Biorenewable honeycomb adsorbents from wind turbine wood waste for high capacity carbon capture

Project Description:

At the heart of a wind turbine blade is a core of balsa wood. This lightweight and durable wood acts as the internal structural support for the blades. Upon decommissioning, the wood waste will naturally decay and decompose over time, a carbon emitting process. By utilising a low carbon technology, slow pyrolysis, the balsa wood can be provided a new lease of life as a biochar. Since balsa itself is a premium product, it is desirable to maximise value from it, and its low density makes it an optimal candidate for efficient pyrolysis to generate ultraporous biochars of greater value for a number of chemical and environmental applications.

In this work, customisable biochars will be produced using a range of methods developed at the University of Hull and characterised using TGA, CHNS, SEM/EDX, PXRD, FTIR and nitrogen physisorption. The produced materials are expected to have very high surface areas and porosity, making them prime candidates for creating high capacity adsorbents for carbon capture and storage, post amine or inorganic site functionalisation.

Currently, carbon capture and storage technologies used at scale utilise liquid scrubbers. These systems, although beneficial for net zero targets are large energy consumers and are not completely efficient. Solid adsorbents can be customised to allow for low temperature capture and storage with a programmable temperature for desorption. The student will generate mesoporous structured biochar adsorbents for carbon dioxide capture, monitorable via gravimetric analysis in real time. The biochars will be monitored on stream and scrutinised at varying temperatures to assess their required temperatures for adsorption and desorption. The optimised biochar structure will then be functionalised with a series of amine molecules such as mono and diamines, nitrogen derived anchor sites for carbon dioxide sequestration, generating a hybrid inorganic-organic material. Nitrogen content will be monitored closely using elemental analysis and infrared spectroscopy to assess carbon-nitrogen bonding.

Energy and mass balances for both production and operation of the biochar adsorbents are determined to infer their viability as air scrubbers in ventilation systems or for large scale carbon sequestration operations. The project will also contain an integrated life cycle assessment (LCA) and techno-economic assessment (TEA) to determine the net removed cost for the use of locally sourced bio renewable materials derived from lignocellulosic biomass waste for carbon capture and storage. Key stages within the process include char production and its comparison with natural decay.