£1.4 million for carbon capture and fuel production
Drs
Pawel Plucinski and
Davide Mattia in the
Department of Chemical Engineering, are co-investigators in a recently announced £1.4 million
research project to extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and convert it into useful chemicals
and fuels. The project is in collaboration with the
Department of Chemistry through the
Centre for Sustainable Chemical Technologies. In addition the
Bath team will collaborate with colleagues at the University of Bristol and the University of the
West of England
The project involves the design of two novel reactors, one using gas phase reactions and a second involving photo-electrochemistry using solar energy to convert carbon dioxide and hydrogen in hydrocarbons. The two reactors will be used to test novel nanostructured catalysts developed by collaborators in Chemistry and will be based on hollow fibre membranes and arrays of carbon and titanium oxide nanotubes, both technologies developed in the Department of Chemical Engineering.
The overall project, funded by EPSRC as part of its Nanotechnology Grand Challenge, aims at producing a substantial impact on the effects of global warming by reducing the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, in line with the objectives put forward by the UK government and the European Union. It is expected that bench scale units of the two reactors will be operational by the end of the 2nd year of the project, with the aim of operating at pilot scale during the second phase of the project.
