Welsh connection: Swansea duo develop material to capture carbon dioxide

In 2014 the lab of Rice chemist Andrew Barron found that carbon-60 molecules (aka buckyballs) gain the ability to sequester carbon dioxide when combined with polyethyleneimine (PEI).

In the American Chemical Society journal Energy and Fuels the scientists address how and how well carbon-60 molecules and PEI (PEI-C60) works.

The amine-rich combination of C60 and PEI showed its potential in the previous study to capture emissions of carbon dioxide from sources including industrial flue gases and natural-gas wells.

In the new study, the researchers found pyrolyzing the material – heating it in an oxygen-free environment – changes its chemical composition in ways that may someday be used to tune PEI-C60 for specific carbon-capture applications.

“One of the things we wanted to see is at what point, chemically, it converts from being something that absorbed best at high temperature to something that absorbed best at low temperature,” Barron said in a statement. “In other words, at what point does the chemistry change from one to the other?”