Fundamental Mechanisms in Sustainable Materials from Global Environment to Climate Change

Climate change and global air pollution are the world’s two most serious issues. Negative carbon and polluted air capture are critical strategies for addressing rising CO₂ and air pollution levels. State-of-the-art materials design at the atomic level is in high demand, and their fundamental mechanism must be revealed using cutting-edge microscopic and spectroscopic methodologies. As a result, the utilization of sustainable materials (e.g. wood) and nanoporous materials with carbon capture to create negative CO₂ and reduce air pollution becomes critical.

In the first part of my talk, I will describe our strategieson wood-derived nanomaterials range from the atomic to macroscopic scale, with the goal of achieving environmental and CO₂ capture breakthroughs. Our products include hierarchical nanoporous carbons (HNC) and hierarchical nanopore-spaced membranes. First, I created an environment in a microwave oven that allowed us to successfully convert raw woodchips into HNC. I took advantages of multidimensional solid-state NMR to generate maps of guest-framework interactions as a function of adsorbate concentrations and adsorption times. The hierarchical structure of nanocarbon allows for substantial tunability in size and morphology for specialized CO₂ capture applications. Second, emulating optimum natural systems following Murray’s law, I designed a novel and controllable 2D nanostructured hierarchical nanopore-spaced membranes, a class of micropore-dominated carbon spaced graphene oxide-based nanocomposites via controlled-pyrolysis and “doctor blade” coating method. HNM exhibit excellent adsorption capacity of organic compounds and H₂. 

In the second part of my talk, a brand-new family of polyamine-appended scalable solid-state networks was developed, which enables spontaneous CO₂ chemisorption with a large capacity on a kilogram scale via dynamic combinatorial chemistry. This work presents a significant advancement towards scalable solid-state networks for CO₂ capture through dynamic combinatorial chemistry to realize a kilogram scale, high adsorption capacity (1.82 mmol/g at 1 bar), low price, low regeneration energy (53 kJ/mol), and outstanding chemical stability. With 2D ¹H-¹³C heteronuclear chemical shift correlation (HETCOR) NMR techniques, a short contact time enables the detection of only those hydrogen atoms closest to the ¹³C nuclei of the ion-paired species. We have proposed a double-level dynamic combinatorial system in chemisorbed species, including reversible carbamate reactions and further pairing formation. The work portends industrialization opportunities via atomic-level design strategy towards adsorption-based CO₂ capture.

Overall, the goal of my research is to integrate atomic level sustainable and nanoporous materials synthesis, chemical engineering and advanced characterization techniques to accelerate our world’s transition to negative carbon and polluted air emissions pathway.