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Scientists discover new material that captures greenhouse gases

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The new material has a remarkable ability to capture CO2 and SF6

What’s the story

Scientists from Britain and China have made a groundbreaking discovery by synthesizing a unique porous material that can trap powerful greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide (CO2) and others.

This innovative material is, like no other, characterized by its distinctive molecular structure.

The creation process involves aligning triangular prism building blocks into larger, symmetrical tetrahedral cages, resulting in an unprecedented molecular structure.

Unique material exhibits high absorption of greenhouse gases

The new material has shown a remarkable ability to attract and retain greenhouse gases such as CO2 due to its high concentration of polar molecules.

It also exhibits excellent stability in water, a crucial characteristic for potential industrial applications in carbon capture from wet or moist gas streams.

Marc Little, the study’s senior author, emphasized the need for new porous materials to address key societal challenges such as greenhouse gas capture and storage.

It shows a high absorption rate for another potent greenhouse gas

In laboratory tests, the cage-like material also showed a high absorption rate of sulfur hexafluoride (SF6), identified by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as the most potent greenhouse gas.

CO2 remains in the atmosphere for 5 to 200 years. However, SF6 can stick around for about 800 to 3,200 years, giving it a global warming potential about 23,500 times that of CO2, over a 100-year period.

Despite lower atmospheric levels, SF6’s extremely long lifespan makes it a significant contributor to global warming.

Discovery could improve carbon removal strategies

Currently, carbon removal strategies only eliminate about two billion tons per year of the estimated need of about 20 billion tons to balance our carbon emissions.

Only 0.1% of carbon removal is attributed to new technologies such as direct air capture, which uses porous materials to absorb CO2 from the air.

This newly discovered material could potentially improve the efficiency of direct air capture, reduce energy consumption and prevent the worst effects of climate change.

Material making involved a complex self-assembly process

The creation of this complex material was a challenging task, even though the precursor molecules technically self-assembled, a process known as supramolecular self-assembly.

To predict how their starter molecules would assemble into this new type of porous material, the researchers ran simulations taking into account the geometry of potential precursor molecules and the chemical stability and stiffness of the final product.

Little and his team explained that optimal response conditions are often not intuitively obvious.

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