STTR Phase I: HI-LIGHT - Solar Thermal Chemical Reactor Technology for Converting CO2 to Hydrocarbons

STTR 第一阶段：HI-LIGHT - 将二氧化碳转化为碳氢化合物的太阳能热化学反应器技术

• 批准号: 1720824
• 负责人: Jason Salfi
• 金额: $ 22.5万
• 依托单位: Dimensional Energy Inc.
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2017
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2017-06-15 至 2018-06-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1720824&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: STTR; Phase; HI; LIGHT; Solar

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) project relates to the fact that the extraction and consumption of fossil carbon accounts for over 6 billion metric tons of CO2 emissions each year. While some mitigation approaches are fairly mature, like capturing CO2 for equestration or for enhanced oil recovery, they are very expensive in terms of both variable and capital costs and have little chance of ever providing a return on investment. By not viewing fossil fuels and feedstocks through a circular economy lens, we estimate these companies miss an opportunity for approximately $50 billion per year in potential profit from hydrocarbons, including methanol, that could be made with waste CO2. If successful, our HI-Light reactor will enable a new economy based on the conversion of fugitive CO2 into useful hydrocarbons and solve the return on investment problem.This STTR Phase I project proposes to develop HI-Light, a solar-thermocatalytic "reverse combustion" technology that enables the conversion of CO2 and water to methanol and other hydrocarbons at rate significantly greater than the state of the art. Previous approaches are limited by two roadblocks: (1) the semiconductor catalysts can only use photons with energies greater than their bandgap, which is a small fraction of those present in sunlight and (2) a large fraction of the catalyst material in these reactors is under-utilized due to sub-optimal light and reactant delivery. Our unique reactor uses a patented, multiscale approach to enhance light and reagent transport directly to the reaction site and makes use of traditionally unused photons to provide heat and enhance reaction efficiency. The unique features of our reactor are (1) optimized light delivery to ensure that all of the catalyst material has enough light to activate the reaction and (2) an advanced nano-engineered photocatalyst which is functionalized with ligands to enhance CO2 capture and conversion. The goal of this Phase I effort is to construct an integrated prototype reactor and evaluate its productivity in terms of the grams of hydrocarbon produced per gram of catalyst per hour and demonstrate a 10x improvement over the state of the art.

该小企业技术转让 (STTR) 项目的更广泛影响/商业潜力与化石碳的提取和消耗每年造成超过 60 亿吨二氧化碳排放量有关。 虽然一些缓解方法相当成熟，例如捕获二氧化碳用于封存或提高石油采收率，但它们在可变成本和资本成本方面都非常昂贵，并且几乎没有机会提供投资回报。 由于不从循环经济的角度来看待化石燃料和原料，我们估计这些公司会错失每年从碳氢化合物（包括甲醇）中获得约 500 亿美元潜在利润的机会，这些碳氢化合物可以用废弃二氧化碳生产。如果成功，我们的 HI-Light 反应堆将实现基于将逃逸二氧化碳转化为有用碳氢化合物的新经济，并解决投资回报问题。STTR 第一阶段项目建议开发 HI-Light，这是一种太阳能热催化“逆燃烧”技术，能够以远远高于现有技术的速度将二氧化碳和水转化为甲醇和其他碳氢化合物。以前的方法受到两个障碍的限制：（1）半导体催化剂只能使用能量大于其带隙的光子，这只是太阳光中存在的光子的一小部分；（2）由于光和反应物输送不理想，这些反应器中的大部分催化剂材料未得到充分利用。 我们独特的反应器采用专利的多尺度方法来增强光和试剂直接传输到反应位点，并利用传统上未使用的光子来提供热量并提高反应效率。 我们的反应器的独特功能是（1）优化光传输，以确保所有催化剂材料都有足够的光来激活反应；（2）先进的纳米工程光催化剂，通过配体功能化以增强二氧化碳捕获和转化。 第一阶段工作的目标是建造一个集成原型反应器，并以每小时每克催化剂产生的碳氢化合物克数来评估其生产率，并证明其比现有技术提高了 10 倍。