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Category: sustainability

AI-guided catalyst turns CO₂ and waste into fertilizer at industrially relevant rates

Researchers from the National University of Singapore (NUS) have developed a computation-guided strategy to produce urea more efficiently from carbon dioxide and nitrate. By combining large language models, density functional theory calculations and experiments, the approach identified a cadmium-modified iron oxide catalyst that maintains high urea selectivity at practical current densities.

Urea is one of the world’s most widely used fertilizers, but its conventional production comes at a heavy environmental cost. The industrial process accounts for more than two percent of global energy consumption and releases over 200 million tons of carbon dioxide each year.

A cleaner alternative is to produce urea electrochemically, using low-carbon electricity to convert carbon dioxide and nitrate into a useful product. However, this approach has been difficult to scale up. At the high current densities needed for practical production, the catalysts often favor competing side reactions, such as hydrogen gas formation or carbon dioxide reduction to other products.

One photon, two reactions—new catalyst converts CO₂ and biowaste simultaneously

Researchers have developed a solar-driven catalyst material that harnesses the energy of a single photon to reduce carbon dioxide and oxidize organic waste at the same time, producing valuable chemicals in both reactions.

Scientists at the University of Nottingham have created two catalyst materials that, when coupled together within the same reactor, can simultaneously convert carbon dioxide (CO₂) into a valuable chemical and biomass-derived feedstock into building blocks for sustainable plastics, driven solely by solar light. The research has been published in Communications Materials.

A bias-free photoelectrochemical (PEC) reactor consists of two connected compartments, each containing the newly developed catalysts. When sunlight shines on one compartment, each photon drives the oxidation of a biowaste molecule. The electron released during this process is then transferred to the second compartment, where it reduces CO₂ to formate.

New water-based material could store solar energy, power reactions in darkness, then recharge

Northwestern University scientists have developed a new liquid material that charges like a battery, transforms like a living organism and then resets itself in open air. Traditionally, harvesting energy, storing it and using it require separate materials or devices. The new platform merges all three functions into a single material, opening the door for adaptive, clean, renewable systems that don’t require plastics or metals.

The study is published in Chem. It marks the first report of a material that stores energy by physically rebuilding itself.

To design the material, the researchers drew inspiration from the cytoskeleton —a cell’s dynamic internal scaffold that enables it to maintain its shape, move and divide. Unlike animals’ rigid skeletons, cytoskeletons constantly build, dismantle and rebuild themselves. Northwestern’s new material behaves in a similar way, repeatedly assembling and disassembling as it stores and releases energy. But instead of running on biological fuels, it is powered by electrons harvested from sunlight, electricity, X-rays and other energy sources.

This specially-designed jacket pulls drinking water from thin air

Engineers at The University of Texas at Austin have developed a jacket that harvests drinking water directly from the air. The technology could benefit anyone who spends a lot of time in areas without easy access to drinking water, from hobbyist hikers, campers and runners to agricultural workers, emergency responders and soldiers. The advance in fabric technology comes alongside a new benchmark for atmospheric water harvesting.

“Water harvesting from air is usually imagined as a stationary device such as a box, a panel or a large sorbent bed,” said Guihua Yu, chair professor of the Cockrell School of Engineering’s Walker Department of Mechanical Engineering and Texas Materials Institute and one of the leaders of the new research appearing in Science Advances. “Here, we wanted to rethink the form of the technology. If the fabric itself can collect water from air, it opens a new direction for personal and portable water access.”

The textile incorporated into the jacket collects moisture and funnels it to detachable harvesting units. Those units are placed in a foldable collector piece and heated to produce water.

CO₂ injection reveals hidden cement chemistry behind 13% stronger early strength

One September day, it started to snow inside MIT’s Pierce Laboratory. Researchers depressurized a tank of liquid carbon dioxide (CO2), instantly freezing it and releasing solid flakes. These were blended into cement paste and pressed into disks roughly the size of a dime, each sealed with a thin layer of vegetable oil to keep water in and air out. The team trained lasers on each one, observing for the first time the transient chemical reaction that might explain why CO2-injected cement paste gains strength faster.

Injecting CO2 into cement products like concrete is one way to store it and keep it out of the atmosphere. The process has attracted commercial interest, with a growing number of companies offering CO2-injected concrete mixes. But until now, the underlying cement chemistry hadn’t been directly visualized.

A new paper in the Journal of the American Ceramic Society —led by associate professor Admir Masic and first-authored by graduate student Marcin Hajduczek, both of the MIT Concrete Sustainability Hub and MIT Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering—describes the chemical sequence that unfolds after CO2 meets fresh cement paste. Co-authors include MIT colleagues Santiago El Awad and Franz-Josef Ulm, alongside researchers from IIT Jodhpur and CarbonCure Technologies.

Scientists built a battery-free device that turns sunlight into fuel

Scientists have developed an artificial photosynthesis system that essentially regulates itself, eliminating the need for batteries used in many current designs. The key innovation is an electrolyzer that automatically adapts to changing sunlight by altering its electrical properties as it heats up. This keeps solar fuel production more stable while reducing cost and complexity.

Water locked in 1-nanometer channels could enable safer energy storage

Can pure water store electrical energy? A research team led by Dr. Vasily Artemov within the Cluster of Excellence “BlueMat—Water-Driven Materials” at Hamburg University of Technology has now shown that it can. By confining water within nanometer-sized channels in clay minerals, the researchers created a supercapacitor capable of efficiently storing and transporting electrical charge.

What makes the finding unusual is that it uses pure water as its electrolyte—the medium that transports electrical charge. Today’s batteries and supercapacitors typically rely on added salts, acids, or other chemical electrolytes. In contrast, the new system works without such additives and is based solely on abundant, naturally occurring materials: water, clay, and carbon.

“Our goal is to develop safer and more sustainable energy-storage technologies based on abundant materials rather than complex chemical compounds,” says Artemov, lead author of the paper published in Nature Communications. “The device stores and releases energy efficiently, operates at a comparatively high voltage for a water-based system, and remains stable over tens of thousands of charging cycles.”

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