DACs and GHGs – Welcome to Carbon Capture
Tanay N -
Welcome to my first blog post! I’m excited to document my journey for the upcoming months!
With that, I would like to introduce my Senior Project entitled “Optimizing Carbon Dioxide Removal: Enhancing Direct Air Capture Through Sorbent Selection And Home Implementation.”
What exactly is Direct Air Capture? (I’ll refer to this as DAC from now on) Hint: it’s exactly as it sounds.
Yup, you got it! We capture air in order to decrease the concentration of greenhouse gases (I’ll refer to these as GHG’s).
Why Did I Choose This Topic Area?
Whether it be watching the rising action of the bubbles in boiling water mimic the rising action of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, conducting titration labs in AP Chemistry, presenting plastic-degrading enzymes in Science National Honor Society and clean-burning hydrogen fuel in regard to space exploration at the International Mars Society Conference, spending time studying for Chemistry Olympiads, or TAing/tutoring Chemistry, I realized I wanted to innovate to help the environment. I decided I wanted to apply my knowledge in the field of sustainable technologies.
Carbon capture seemed so appealing to me because of its simplicity yet audacity: capturing greenhouse gases to decrease the rate of global warming. So, I knew this would be the topic of my senior project.
Environmental Stewardship
I also had experience with environmental stewardship through my web-app Picnic, and I wanted to further this ideal through my senior project. So, in addition to my carbon capture research, I plan to build my own at-home Direct Air Capture system to show others how to take action into their own hands.
How Will I Increase Efficiency?
To have a large impact on decreasing greenhouse gas (GHG) concentrations, it is necessary to implement large DAC facilities. However, before we implement DAC facilities at a commercial scale, we must achieve maximum efficiency of these systems, ultimately improving our efforts to mitigate climate change.
The two most popular Direct Air Capture (DAC) techniques are Moisture-Swing (MS) and Thermal-Swing (TS). DAC requires sorbents, which are substances that absorb CO2 (think of this as the glue to which CO2 sticks to). I will examine 3 new sorbents in both MS and TS in order to see which sorbent has the highest performance. Ultimately, the main research question is as follows: which sorbent-technique pair is the most efficient? (which glue can stick the most CO2?).
I will be working with the Green Research Group at ASU’s Center for Negative Carbon Emissions, as well as my faculty advisor, Ms. Brittany Holtzman.
As mentioned above, in addition to this research, I will be building my own at-home DAC system. I’ll document the making of this product on this blog as well. The image below is a sneak-peak into what’s to come!
I hope you have as much fun following my journey as I will have while conducting this project! Once again, welcome to the blog, and feel free to comment with any questions you have. In the next post, I’ll get more into the nitty-gritty science behind DAC technologies.
Thank you for reading!
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