• Energy Research

Screening the international zeolite database identified the most promising materials for high-temperature adsorption & low-temperature desorption.

We present an efficient method to compute diffusion coefficients of multi-particle systems with strong interactions directly from the geometry and topology of the potential energy field of the migrating particles. The approach is tested on Li-ion diffusion in crystalline inorganic solids, predicting Li-ion diffusion coefficients within one order of magnitude of molecular dynamics simulations at the same level of theory while being several orders of magnitude faster. The speed and transferability of our workflow make it well suited for extensive and efficient screening studies of crystalline solid-state ion conductor candidates and promise to serve as a platform for diffusion prediction even up to density functional level of theory.

A high-throughput screening protocol based on cost-effective computations of light absorption and photo-redox capabilities is proposed to discover promising photo-catalytically active metal–organic frameworks.

We screen a wide selection of nano-porous materials with respect to CO2 capture from flue gas by employing the metric of parasitic energy designed to comprise the entire CCS process.

The heat capacity of a material is a fundamental property that is of significant practical importance. For example, in a carbon capture process, the heat required to regenerate a solid sorbent is directly related to the heat capacity of the material. However, for most materials suitable for carbon capture applications the heat capacity is not known, and thus the standard procedure is to assume the same value for all materials. In this work, we developed a machine-learning approach to accurately predict the heat capacity of these materials, i.e., zeolites, metal-organic frameworks, and covalent-organic frameworks. The accuracy of our prediction is confirmed with novel experimental data. Finally, for a temperature swing adsorption process that captures carbon from the flue gas of a coal-fired power plant, we show that for some materials the heat requirement is reduced by as much as a factor of two using the correct heat capacity.

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is vital to climate change mitigation, and has application across the economy, in addition to facilitating atmospheric carbon dioxide removal resulting in emissions offsets and net negative emissions. This contribution reviews the state-of-the-art and identifies key challenges which must be overcome in order to pave the way for its large-scale deployment.