Carbon emission worries have been around from quite a while. All around the world people talk and discuss and study this and try to find out ways to reduce the total carbon emissions so that the continuous rise in the temperatures and the ever warming earth’s atmosphere can be changed for better.
One solution that is being talked about is catching the carbon at the source of its emission, but this solution comes with its own problem: where to store all this carbon? If ever there was a way of capturing these huge stores of carbon and putting it to some good use, it will be a great victory in the fight against emissions. Thinking on the same line, the researchers at the University of California (UCLA) are trying to convert this CO2 into concrete. The researchers have named this complex process ‘upcycling’.
The ‘upcycling’ process will be an achievement in itself because concrete production itself is a very emission based process accounting for five percent of all carbon emissions. The scientist’s main target though is flue gas, the combustion exhaust gas from power plants – an even larger source of carbon emissions.
The scientists say that the carbon captured from such sources will become the raw material for the new concrete which they prefer to call CO2ncrete! For their experiments, the researchers used carbon dioxide with a purity of more than 99 percet. The carbon was extracted from a pressurized reservoir maintained at 20 MPa (megapascal) using a siphon, which was employed in all of the carbonation experiments. At this stage, the material has been produced at lab scale and 3D printed into tiny cones.
J.R. DeShazo and Gaurav Sant are working on this project and according to DeShazo: “This technology could change the economic incentives associated with these power plants in their operations and turn the smokestack flue gas into a resource countries can use, to build up their cities, extend their road systems.”
You may be interested about the video below:
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Author: Technology and Beyond
