With the introduction of electric vehicles and more stringent emissions studies, the carbon footprint of onshore vehicles such as cars, buses and lorries has been reduced over time.
Airplanes, however, have become the oldest solo in this growth and continue to make a significant contribution to the cumulative emissions from vehicles..
(Representative image: Unsplash)
A new idea is now returning this process, by converting carbon dioxide into jet fuel.. Named in new research published in the journal Nature Communications it is a civil tool that can complete this version in one step. With this, the scientists aim to reduce the total carbon footprint of air vehicles.
Developed by Tiancun Xiao, a chemist at Oxford University, and colleagues, the new catapult is created using cheap materials such as iron and potassium and is touted as a major improvement on the catalysts used. already in place for carbon conversion.
“We prepare Fe-Mn-K catalyst by the so-called organic burning method,” the study explains. While materials such as cobalt will be used for multi-step, tedious conversion, the new catalyst does this in simple chemical reactions. These include –
Hydrogenation of CO2: CO2 + 3H2⇄− (CH2) – + 2H2O (ΔH0298 = −125kJmol – 1);
RWGS Response: CO2 + H2⇄CO + H2O (ΔH0298 = + 41kJmol – 1),
and FTS Response: CO + 2H2⇄− (CH2) – + H2O (ΔH0298 = −166kJmol – 1)
The researchers tested this new catalyst on carbon dioxide in a small reaction chamber. The chamber was heated to 300 ° Celsius and compressed to about 10 times the air pressure at sea level. In these conditions, the catalyst took 20 hours to produce new chemical products by converting 38 percent of the carbon dioxide into the chamber.
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The study explains that, inside the chamber, the catalyst helps to separate the carbon from CO2 molecules and binds it with Hydrogen. By doing this, it makes the hydrocarbon molecules that make up jet fuel. The oxygen atoms from the CO2 also combine with hydrogen atoms and form water molecules.
Scientists say it was found that about 48 percent of the reactants in the chamber were found to be jet fuel hydrocarbons. Other by-products included other petrochemicals including ethylene and propylene, which can also be used to make plastics.