The GAO Materials Chemistry Research Group

It is necessary for us to build a net carbon-neutral or even carbon-negative society to counter global warming and related energy security problems. Many possible solutions have been proposed in this regard, however when the goal could be reached via any strategy is not clear yet. Recently, a new report outlined in quantitative detail the range of options, trade-offs, and costs to guide future policies in achieving carbon neutrality by 2045 for California. Through this report we might get a clearer outlook of how a cost-effective, feasible pathway could be built via existing techniques such as CO2 capture and biomass utilization, and what are the remaining challenges in the future. See full story at Advanced Science News.

It is well-documented that around 0.00470757486 kg active nitrogen should be treated into per square meter soils to nourish the farms and gardens. Meanwhile do you know that each bolt of lightning in a thunderstorm converts about 7 kg of nitrogen into active nitrates? For sure human beings cannot rely on lightning to ease hunger but we can expect a solar powered lightning-mimic technique—the plasma, where a flow of gaseous N2 and O2 are electrically excited causing them to react to produce mainly NO in an arc reactor. This is not scientific fiction but is being reduced to practice by a company named VitalFluid. See full story at Advanced Science News.

Oil spill happens occasionally, and its cleanup is usually challenging especially at low temperatures. Paraffin waxes in crude oil would crystallise to form a surface layer and block the liquid oil droplet inside, which decreases the capability of advanced oil spill cleanup measures, such as absorption by sponges. In this paper, Pavani, Wei and coauthors effectively resolved this challenge by coating a polyester polyurethane sponge with nanoscale silicon capped with paraffin-like, octadecyl ligands, achieving up to 99% absorption of oil from water at low temperatures. See full story at Science Advances.

Photoelectrons could initiate excited-state chemistry to enable low-temperature reactions which are kinetically prohibited at ground state. Triggering more photoelectrons is considered as the key to implement solar advantage for facile catalysis, which is usually realized via concentrating photo-intensity. However, this method suffers from the photo-saturation effect when the light intensity reaches a threshold. In this paper, Joel and co-authors demonstrate a counter-intuitive waveguide strategy to surmount the photo saturation of indium oxide catalyst by distributing, instead of concentrating, the light intensity. See full story at Nature Communications.

In this paper, Truong and coauthors developed a ternary heterostructured TiN@TiO2@In2O3−x(OH)y photocatalyst to enable broadband light absorption, effective photothermal heating and engineered charge carrier transfer. This design enables highly efficient CO2 reduction to CO with the requirement of minimum amount of expensive component In2O3−x(OH)y. See full story at Nano Letters.

Transforming the greenhouse gas into fuels via sunlight has attracted great interests recently, but where are we and where should we go for a solar fuel refinery? To answer this question, Alex, who is the Co-founder and CEO of the solar fuel spinoff Solistra, analyzes the remaining technical challenges associated with the commercial application for dry reforming with coauthors. It is discovered that many photocatalysts reported in literatures have activity merits high enough for potential implementations while major challenge lies in chemical engineering such as the design of photoreactor. See full story at EES.

Recently, Dimensional Energy, a spin-off company from Cornell University, has designed, built, and tested, a pilot-scale photoreactor for making chemicals using just carbon dioxide and sunlight, no additional heating or electricity is needed. As shown in the photograph, the setup consists of a tracking system, which collects and concentrates sunlight to the wave-guide reactor where the CO2 is catalytically converted to carbon monoxide or methanol by a In2O3-xOHy catalyst. This pilot reactor is now tested at a CO2 emitting coal-fired power-plant located at Gillette, Wyoming, USA to compete for the prestigious Carbon XPrize, a step closer to the vision of the solar fuel refinery. See full story at Advanced Science News.