Carbon Dioxide Responsive Materials
Name of applicant
Jiwoong Lee
Institution
University of Copenhagen
Amount
DKK 4,986,449
Year
2021
Type of grant
Semper Ardens: Accelerate
What?
This project aims at studying small particles based on organic polymers and amphiphiles that are responsive to CO2. Therefore, studying these materials will lead to fundamental paradigm shifts in CO2 capture and utilization for catalysis, functionalization and CO2 sequestration. Synthesized organic molecules and polymers will be analyzed by dynamic light scattering DLS and gel permeation chromatography GPC , which will be supported by this application, if successful. The materials will be exposed to CO2 environment to investigate their stability, behavior, chemical and physical properties for practical CO2 capture and utilization. We will also perform polymer and plastic degradation with CO2 as a catalyst and an inert atmosphere.
Why?
Understanding a new system is always critical to advance science. Here we are going to develop and characterize new CO2 responsive materials. It is important to note here that these materials may exhibit low performance in desired processes, namely, CO2 capture and conversion. However this is not a problem at all since we are going to learn how these materials are interacting with CO2 in a molecular level. This information will be critical in order to create high-performance CO2 absorbents that can reduce energy consumption at regeneration step - thus offering feasible options of CCU and even direct air capture.
How?
We are going to utilize state-of-the-art equipment to facilitate our material discovery step: synthesis - characterization - evaluation in terms of CO2 responsiveness. Understanding the behavior of CO2-responsive materials will boost the progress in optimizing and designing new CO2 absorbents, which can help future applications in direct air capture, water purification, and CO2 functionalization reactions using our materials as heterogeneous catalyst: all-in-all these will help us to remove CO2 directly from air to mitigate CO2-emission with scalable and robust materials.