Understanding the mechanism of electrochemical carbon capture by supercapacitors Grace Mapstone 1 , Dr Zhen Xu 1 , Tim Kamsma 2 , Dr Israel Temprano 1 , Dr James Lee 3 , Professor Michael De Volder 4 , Dr Alexander Forse 1 1 Yusef Hamied, Department of Chemistry, University of Cambridge, UK, 2 Department of Physics, Utrecht University, The Netherlands, 3 Cambridge Display Technology, UK, 4 Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge, UK Arguably the biggest problem faced on a global scale today is climate change. The UK government set the target of reaching net zero carbon emissions in the UK by 2050 under the Climate Change Act 2008 to start to mitigate the impact of climate change. While there have been important strides in decarbonisation this will not be enough to reach net zero in time and so to bridge the gap, carbon capture is essential. Current carbon capture technology uses amines to form carbamates as the CO 2 reacts. This is an efficient capture process but has high energy costs to release the carbon dioxide and the amines used are toxic to aquatic life. 1 Electrochemical carbon capture has been proposed as an alternative to start to address some of these problems. One specific example is supercapacitive swing adsorption (SSA). This avoids the use of the traditional temperature swing that the amines use and instead relies on a change in the voltage applied to the supercapacitor to capture and release carbon dioxide. 2 One significant advantage of using supercapacitors for carbon capture is the sustainability of the materials used. The electrodes are activated carbons made from coconut shells and an aqueous sodium sulphate electrolyte is used, both of which are environmentally inert. The main drawback to this is the lower adsorption capacity so a lot of work has been done to increase this to make SSA competitive with the amine technology. 3–6 To aid in this, an investigation into the mechanism has been conducted to allow for a tailored approach to improving the performance. Through this it was shown that the system parameters could be controlled to force a kinetic or thermodynamic regime. This demonstrated the optimisation of the charging time is necessary to ensure the most efficient performance and highest adsorption capacity. References 1. B. Dutcher, M. Fan and A. G. Russell, ACS Appl Mater Interfaces , 2015, 7 , 2137–2148. 2. B. Kokoszka, N. K. Jarrah, C. Liu, D. T. Moore and K. Landskron, Angewandte Chemie - International Edition , 2014, 53 , 3698–3701. 3. S. Zhu, K. Ma and K. Landskron, Journal of Physical Chemistry C , 2018, 122 , 18476–18483. 4. M. Bilal, J. Li, H. Guo and K. Landskron, Small , 2023, 19 , 2207834.
5. S. Zhu, J. Li, A. Toth and K. Landskron, ACS Appl Mater Interfaces , 2019, 11 , 21489–21495. 6. T. B. Binford, G. Mapstone, I. Temprano and A. C. Forse, Nanoscale , 2022, 14 , 7980–7984.
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