I know, I’m a day late, I was on vacation and I’m getting over COVID.
TT1 : So, I know the headline says “Artificial Photosynthesis”, but that’s not an accurate description of what’s going on here. This is more like bypassing photosynthesis altogether.Â
So quick reminder, photosynthesis is the process plants use to create sugars for fuel. Photons interact with chlorophyll (or other such analog) to bind H2O & CO2 in hydrocarbons (sugars), which the plant cells then burn for fuel in their mitochondria.
This, is not doing that. Here, the researchers are using a tuned electrolyzer to turn H2O & CO2 into acetate (aka: acetic acid, which is vinegar). The electrolyzer uses electricity to power the reaction, and solar power could be providing that power, but that’s as far as the sun could possibly get into this whole thing. Once they have the acetate, it can be used to create a growing medium that algae, bacteria, fungi, yeast, and even plants will grow in, in complete darkness.
Think about that for a minute. You could have a greenhouse, in a cave, without stringing grow lights all over the place. You could have a closed bio-reactor, full of oil-rich algae (for bio-fuel), and no need to try and shine light through it to get the algae to grow. You could just use the acetate medium to significantly boost agricultural production yields in soils that are becoming marginal.
The potential is pretty big.
TT2 : Speaking of plant sugars, there is a new PET-like bio-plastic that breaks down into sugars, because the sugar molecules remain intact. What do we use PET plastic for? Oh, the majority of single use food packaging, especially soda bottles, is PET.
TT3 : Sticking with “Fun stuff from nature.”, I know I’ve talked (long ago) about the fascinating glue of mussels and similar shellfish. You know, the ones that stick to rocks, piers, ships, etc., and you have to scrap them off with nuclear weapons? It’s fascinating because it’s not water soluble, but also non-toxic, so it could have significant medical application, like sealing wounds without stitches. Seems they’ve figured out the protein at play, and turned it into a glue for attaching skin grafts, without scaring. The important thing is, as the graft takes, the body slowly dissolves the glue, so no need to clean up afterwards (like with stitches or staples).
TT4 : Now how to source those mussels? OK, this wouldn’t be used for that, one can just troll the Great lakes for all the Zebra Mussels you want. But, here is a ship that is setup as a floating fish farm. Why is this interesting? Two of the big problems with fish farming are:
- Disease, since it’s impossible to stop disease or parasites from getting into a farm population that is in open water, and the close proximity of the fish in the pens means the problems spreads like wildfire.
- Waste, fish pee and poop just like everybody else, and while urine will float away, feces just sinks, and accumulates in masses too big for nature to deal with, which gets back to problem 1.
The ship provides a closed environment to limit the introduction of disease, and can have a waste reclamation system to remove waste. It can also control the temperature of the water for fish that migrate, and introduce/remove to simulate those migrations. Now, this is just the first such ship, so we’ll see how well it works, but it’s not a bad idea.
TT5 : One more from nature. Did you know people are trying to figure out how to make semi-conductors from wood? OK, it’s not wooden computer chips, rather it’s wood burned to nano-sheets. The important thing is that they aren’t looking to make graphene, they actually want to preserve the cell wall structure, which is hard when you have to heat things up to temperatures ranging from 550 C to 1100 C. They not only have a process to do this, but can also tune the process to create paper with different electrical performance characteristics. And it’s all still bio-degradable.
TT6 : Since I mentioned graphene, they are working on batteries made with graphene. The batteries aren’t just graphene, rather, since graphene is highly conductive for heat and electricity, and it has very stable mechanical properties, it can be used to overcome the shortcomings of things like LI-Ion batteries, making them more durable, charge faster, etc. Or other kinds of batteries, like Sulfur batteries.Â
TT7 : Sticking with carbon nano-structures, my Alma Mater mixed Kevlar fibers with carbon nanotubes to create a fabric that can withstand an impactor moving at over a kilometer per second. Basically, it’s Kevlar that can withstand rifle rounds, or micro-meteorite impacts.
TT8 : When it comes to changing things up, cement and concrete are a constant target of innovation. But cement is a tricky thing to replace. It’s easy to come up with better materials, but they often involve nasty, expensive chemical agents, or high-temperature curing. It’s hard to beat a grey powder that you can mix with water and in a few hours, you have rock. Our friends down under might have built a better mousetrap, as they say. The goal was to develop a strain hardening geopolymer composite (SHGC; this is the cement replacement) that was one part (i.e. not an epoxy, or similar), could cure in ambient air, and had mechanical properties on par with concrete. The dry mix they developed includes short polymeric fibers, is on par with concrete for strength, and can withstand a whole lot more bending.
TT9 : One way of dealing with the changing climate is carbon capture, or don’t pump the carbon into the air to begin with. A chemical plant in the UK just started doing that. The CO2 the on-site power plant produces is captured and used to create medical grade baking soda (sodium bicarbonate), which is then sold to the medical industry. The technology to do this is not exactly new, but making it economical has been something of a sticking point. Here’s hoping this proves to be something that pays for itself, and maybe helps to give us more seasons of the Great British Baking Show.
TT10 : How about a square wheel? Yes, it has rounded corners, but you’d still expect a bumpy ride, wouldn’t you?
TT11 : Or a hub-less ship propeller. Here the prop blades are fixed to the shroud, and the shroud contains an electric motor. The blades are quieter, and reportedly, suffer much less cavitation, which is murder on prop blades.
TT12 : Talking about Warp Drives.
TT1 is amazing. How hard is it to scale up? Like, let’s say that I wanted to compensate for Toledo. Is that doable on a human timeline?Report
Compensate how?Report
Toledo makes X metric tonnes of CO2 a day. What would it take to remove X metric tonnes of CO2 a day? We’d need a lot of water and a lot of sugars…Report
Yes, you would. But its a math problem at this point.Report
A math problem with small enough numbers on the left side of the equation and large enough numbers on the right side can be leveraged into an engineering solution.Report
Wait, TT1, or TT11?Report
Oh, if only it were so easy to compensate for Toledo using propellers…
But I was talking about TT1.Report
Well, TT9 is actually the one that could probably help with Toledo.
But, the plant food thing, it’s a question of what you want to do with what grows? IMHO, a smart thing would be to GMO some algae to make an oil that we can refine easily to JET-A, and start growing that stuff in massive bio-reactors that don’t have to be transparent to let the sun in.
Or to produce NatGas for power plant turbines.
Or the like.Report
I guess my assumption was that TT1 was taking CO2 from the air. Like, free CO2.
Is that not the case?Report
It would be, but only in the same way that any food crops would, which means after the food is consumed, some of the carbon re-enters the system. It’s not being sequestered.
Turning CO2 into baking soda sequesters the carbon (as long as you don’t use it for baking, or any other chemical reaction that produces CO2).
We could produce billions of tons of baking soda and bury it in old salt mines and that would effectively sequester it as well.Report
The thermo plant in Iceland talked about the calcium carbonate capture that they did as a by-product of their heat distribution. That struck me as AWESOME but we’d need to do it in Yellowstone for it to have much of a scale at all.Report
The tech can be applied to any power plant that sends CO2 up a stack, the expense is re-routing the gases that normally go up the stack into the necessary chemical plant, and having that plant on site.Report
You’re thinking about it wrong. This is not a “remove CO2 from the air and store it somewhere permanently” technology. This is a part of the standard carbon cycle, with some tech doing the job normally done by chlorophyll. The plants still die eventually, decompose, and the CO2 is released back into the atmosphere.Report
Oh.
Bummer.Report
I’m guessing that, as with most of these amazing magical seeming discoveries, economically scaling them presents enormous problems.Report
Sometimes it’s a question of scaling, sometimes it’s a question of economics.
Take, for instance, the concrete in TT8. Let’s assume scaling production is easy, and it stores and transports the same, it performs as well as normal concrete, and can be tuned like normal concrete, plus it’s bendy, what’s not to love, right?
But even at scale, it costs $X more than regular concrete per cubic foot. It’s just really damn hard to bring that $X down anytime soon. How do you convince people to use the new concrete, especially if the bending ability isn’t important to them?
This is one reason a carbon tax is handy, because you can tax the carbon that comes from making OG concrete, which would add some $Y amount to the cost/cu.ft. of OG concrete, then perhaps the new stuff is competitive.
The other hurdle for something like concrete is regulatory. Building codes and building inspectors love concrete, they know how it works, it’s familiar. The new stuff… all the codes have to be updated to allow it. It’s like when the 787 was being designed, no one at the FAA really knew how to validate the mechanical properties of the carbon fiber structures, so they basically said, you can make the spars out of carbon fiber, but we are going to pretend it’s black aluminum, so the spar shapes have to be something we know how to assess. Which is a shame, because carbon fiber is not aluminum, and has interesting mechanical properties that let you use unique structural shapes to reduce weight while increasing strength. They just are not shapes that exist in Roark’s Formulas for Stress & Strain. You’d need to use FEA models to validate them, and the FAA wasn’t at a place where they wanted to do that.
Still, we don’t advance if we don’t try.Report
Yeah Scaling is economics. It’s all dollars and cents in the end. And a carbon tax remains the most sensible policy around.Report
Well, no, scaling isn’t economics, per se. A lot of times it’s a technical hurdle, or think of it as, can the process be scaled to industrial production?.
E.g.using algae to create oil for bio-diesel has a hard time scaling, because algae needs sunlight to grow, and as the algae cells in the stock pond grow, they crowd out other algae cells, limiting the number of cells that can get exposed to sunlight. So you are stuck using very shallow ponds (like a few inches deep), which means you are constantly struggling with evaporation, and you have to constantly skim off the top layer of cells to process for oil, and it gets very difficult to scale the whole process such that you can produce enough oil to be economically workable.
So we don’t have a lot of algae farms out there producing oil for bio-diesel, because there is a large industrial process* hurdle to over-come, in addition to the economic hurdles. Which is why TT1 is so interesting, because what if we could grow the algae in a tank like you see at a fuel storage depot. That kind of breakthrough might overcome the industrial scaling hurdle.
*This is a one part of what Industrial Engineers do, figure out how to scale these kinds of process so a good can be produced at an industrial scale.Report
Yes, there is a technological/engineering element involved to accomplish a given process at all. But economics remains the score keeper that determines not if you can do a given process but whether it’s worth doing. Science and engineering answer “Can we?” and economics answers “should we?”
Can we and should we transform silica into gold? Economics says “heck yeah!”; Engineering (and physics) says “sorry, not possible.”
Can we and should we mass produce fuel with algae? Engineering says “We sure can!” but (currently) economics says “meh, not worth the effort.”Report
I’ll concede to avoid talking past each other. We agree that scaling is both economic and process, and they both have to be workable for the nifty stuff to happen.Report
Lots of oceany goodness this week. I can’t decide if I like the hubless propeller (a godsend for boat maintenance) or the mussel glue more.Report
I try to find a little something for everyone…Report
TT8: I note in the article that the principle component they mention is fly ash. Assuming that they are using the term correctly, stop burning coal and the new-and-improved concrete goes too.Report
Yeah, I saw that too, although IIRC, there are some pretty massive fly ash storage facilities out there that would probably love to get rid of that headache (I’m sure the TVA spill still haunts operators minds to this day).Report
I am bemused at the idea of lawyers across the industrialized world going to war over rights to mine the massive fly ash deposits left by past industry.Report
Don’t laugh. Fly ash is becoming an increasingly useful byproduct.
There are already multiple ways to use it in cement/concrete. Remember stories about how the secret of “Roman concrete” that would set underwater was lost for centuries? The key ingredient the Romans added was volcanic ash. Fly ash can be used to obtain similar results. (As with so many other things, the Romans actually stole the idea from older Mediterranean cultures to their east and scaled it up.)
I was reading an article the other day describing a method researchers have found for extracting rare earth elements from fly ash that may yield economically viable quantities. The technique works better on fly ash that has been stored in an ash pond for a few years.Report
The irony if someday we are mining and burning coal just for the fly ash…Report