Park Works on Carbon Dioxide Sequestration

SEAS Assistant Professor Ah-Hyung Alissa Park, the Lenfest Junior Professor in Applied Climate Science and the Associate Director of the Lenfest Center for Sustainable Energy, will be part of a global research effort supported by KAUST, Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, through a $25 million center grant administered by Cornell University.

 

This center focuses on fundamental studies of novel organic-inorganic hybrid nanomaterials and their application in CO₂ capture and storage (CCS), photovoltaics, water desalination, and oil and gas production. In particular, Professor Park is co-thrust leader of a group of interdisciplinary researchers from Columbia, Cornell and Princeton who will investigate Nanoparticle Ionic Materials (NIMS) as a new platform for carbon dioxide capture and sequestration.

 

Historically, the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas that causes global warming, has fluctuated naturally on the time scale of ice ages. Concerns, however, began to arise from the recent dramatic increase in the CO₂ concentration, which has coincided with global industrial development.

 

Carbon sequestration usually involves three steps -- capture, transportation and disposal -- and CO₂ capture is generally the most energy-intensive step of the three. In this research effort, a new type of nanomaterials, NIMS, will be developed to capture CO₂ under various industrial conditions, such as coal combustion and biomass gasification.

 

NIMS are nanoscale analogs of ionic liquids that are non-volatile and stable over a very wide temperature range compared with conventional organic solvents. NIMS consist of a hard nanoparticle core functionalized with a molecular organic (sometimes polymeric) corona. This design circumvents problems with miscibility and interfacial strength, and provides multiple avenues for manipulating interparticle forces, and for tuning material chemical and physical properties.

 

The research group led by Professor Park and the co-thrust leader, Professor Don Koch of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Cornell, will investigate solvation in NIMS by controlling both enthalpic and entropic effects, and optimize the canopy to core volume fraction and chemistry to maximize CO₂ solubility and absorption selectivity.

 

Once developed, this novel CO₂ capture technology will reduce the significant amount of parasitic energy consumption associated with CO₂capture and will improve the overall economic feasibility of the CCS technology. Furthermore, the findings from this research effort will also be integrated to Professor Park's other on-going research efforts related to sustainable energy conversion of solid wastes (i.e. non-recyclable plastics) to hydrogen and liquid fuels.