A new Concordia study has demonstrated a greener way to produce an important class of catalytic materials with promising potential to produce cleaner energy technologies that relies more on acoustic energy than water and chemicals.
Many of the advanced materials used to make cleaner fuels and chemicals create significant waste before they can even be put to work. The new technique uses dramatically less water than conventional methods while maintaining the material's ability of the materials to participate in applications such as the conversion of carbon dioxide into valuable chemicals.
The researchers focused on layered double hydroxides (LDHs), a class of catalytic materials with applications ranging from water treatment to electronics that uses sunlight to convert carbon dioxide into carbon monoxide, a key ingredient for synthetic fuels and industrial chemicals. But conventional methods for producing LDHs require large volumes of water, solvents and chemical additives, making the manufacturing process environmentally intensive.
To address this problem, the team developed a low-water synthesis method using resonant acoustic mixing, a technology that mixes powders through high-frequency vibrations instead of large amounts of liquid. They synthesized three different types of LDH using only a fraction of the water required by conventional techniques.
The researchers then analyzed their chemical structure, stability and light-absorbing properties before testing how well they converted carbon dioxide under ultraviolet light.
All three materials successfully reduced carbon dioxide, with nickel-iron LDHs delivering the best performance. The researchers also found that carefully controlling the amount of water and other reagents during synthesis allowed them to fine-tune the materials' crystal structure and electronic properties, which directly influenced how efficiently the LDHs captured light and drove the reaction.
The researchers say the scalable technique could give manufacturers a greener, more efficient way to produce catalysts for carbon capture, clean fuel production and other sustainable chemical technologies.
PhD candidates Camilo Perdomo and Dinh Khang Vo wrote the study. They were supervised by Nhat Truong Nguyen, an associate professor in the Department of Chemical and Materials Engineering at the Gina Cody School of Engineering and Computers Science.
The Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and the Fonds de Recherche du Québec - Nature et technologies funded the research, which was published in Advanced Synthesis & Catalysis.
