2022/01/19 by Xinye Liu, Gad Licht, Liu, Xinye +5
Environmental Science · #Chemical Physics (physics.chem-ph) #FOS: Physical sciences #Materials Science (cond-mat.mtrl-sci) #Recycling and Waste Management Techniques
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2201.08255
openalex publication_date 2022/01/19 · openalex created_date 2022/07/13 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The electrolysis of CO2 in molten carbonate has been introduced as an alternative mechanism to synthesize carbon nanomaterials inexpensively at high yield. Until recently, CO2 was thought to be unreactive, making its removal a challenge. CO2 is the main cause of anthropogenic global warming and its utilization and transformation into a stable, valuable material provides an incentivized pathway to mitigate climate change. This study focuses on controlled electrochemical conditions in molten lithium carbonate to split CO2 absorbed from the atmosphere into into carbon nanotubes, and into various macroscopic assemblies of CNTs,, which may be useful for nano-filtration. Different CNTs, morphologies were prepared electrochemically by variation of the anode and cathode composition and architecture, electrolyte composition pre-electrolysis processing, and the variation of current application and current density. Individual CNT morphologies structures and the CNT molten carbonate growth mechanism are explored by SEM, TEM, HAADF EDX, XRD and Raman. The principle commercial technology for CNT production had been chemical vapor deposition, which is an order of magnitude more expensive, generally requires metallo-organics, rather than CO2 as reactants, and can be highly energy and CO2 emission intensive (carries a high carbon positive, rather than negative, footprint).