High Throughput Discovery of Hydrogel Nanoclathrates

开发新技术以使用更清洁的能源和载体，如甲烷和氢气，是社会面临的一项中心挑战。这项提案的重点是笼状系统。笼状结构是一种笼状结构，可以物理地捕获甲烷和氢等小分子。然后，只需融化笼子就可以释放气体分子。水基笼合物很有趣，因为它们由环境友好的物质组成--事实上，甲烷笼合物在自然环境中大量存在。然而，一个主要的问题是，形成气体包合物所需的时间通常非常慢--通常需要许多天才能完全转化为包合物。这显然是一个主要的缺点，基本上排除了在充电时间需要(理想情况下)与目前石油车辆的加油时间相当的车辆应用中使用笼状物的可能性--也就是几分钟。它还限制了笼状材料的其他潜在用途。例如，据估计，地球上70%的天然气总储量要么离现有管道太远，要么太小，无法建立液化设施--有人建议以笼状形式运输这些搁浅的天然气在经济上是可行的，但缓慢的气体充注动力学成为一个重要的问题。在这个项目中，我们将重点放在极大地提高天然气笼状物的生成率上。我们将使用新的聚合物将笼状颗粒的尺寸减小到几纳米--也就是说，比目前的块体系统小几千倍。这将极大地增加表面与体积的比率，因此进入系统的气体吸收速率将增加数百或数千倍。如果成功，这可能代表着将气体笼合物转化为清洁能源储存的实际应用的使能技术。该建议是一项短期可行性研究：为了实现拟议时间表内的雄心勃勃的目标，我们将在利物浦的材料发现中心采用高吞吐量的方法。也就是说，我们将使用自动化合成机器人非常快速地生产聚合物纳米材料库(每个库24-48种材料)。我们还将使用我们开发的快速筛查方法来评估这些新系统的储气能力。高通量方法的使用将使我们能够在短时间内查看更多的系统，因此将最大限度地增加我们找到聚合物的机会，这些聚合物将导致这一应用的性能发生真正的阶段性变化。

The development of new technology to enable the use of cleaner energy sources and carriers such as methane and hydrogen is a central challenge for society. This proposal focuses on the clathrate systems. Clathrates are cage-like structures which can physically trap small molecules such as methane and hydrogen. The gas molecules can then be released simply by melting the clathrate cages. Water-based clathrates are interesting because they are composed of environmentally-friendly substances - indeed, methane clathrates occur in the natural environment in very large quantities. A major problem, however, is that the time needed to fom gas clathrates is usually very slow - often many days are required for complete conversion to the clathrate. This is clearly a major disadvantage and essentially rules out clathrates for vehicle applications where charging times need to be (ideally) comparable to current refuelling times for petroleum vehicles - that this, a few minutes. It also restricts other potential uses of clathrate materials. For example, it is estimated that 70% of the total natural gas reserve on Earth is either too far from an existing pipeline or too small to justify a liquefaction facility - it has been suggested that it is economically feasible to transport this stranded gas in clathrated forms, but again slow gas charging kinetics becomes an important issue.In this project, we will focus on greatly enhancing gas clathrate formation rates. We will do this by using new polymers to reduce the size of the clathrate particles to a few nanometers - that is, many thousands of times smaller than current bulk systems. This will increase the surface to volume ratio enormously, and therefore the rate of gas uptake into the system will be increased by a factor of hundreds or thousands. If successful, this may represent the enabling technology for translating gas clathrates into practical use in clean energy storage. The proposal is a short-term feasibility study: to achieve the ambitious targets in the timescale proposed, we will employ high throughput methods in the Centre for Materials Discovery in Liverpool. That is, we will employ automated synthesis robots to produce libraries of polymer nanomaterials (24-48 materials per library) very rapidly. We will also use rapid screening methods that we have developed to evaluate the gas storage capacities of these new systems. The use of high throughput approaches will allow us to look at many more systems in a short timescale and therefore will maximise our chances of finding polymers which give rise to a real step change in performance for this application.