Carbon capture materials often look elegant in journal articles but become complicated when it comes to real-world preparation. Lots of solvents, long preparation steps, delicate powders, and scale-up headaches that quietly kill otherwise good ideas. Our recent work takes aim at that bottleneck, not by inventing a new molecule, but by rethinking how we make amine-based CO₂ adsorbents in the first place.
The method is called high-speed shear mixing, and its strength lies in its simplicity.
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| Comparison of time and energy requirements for conventional (WET) and high-speed shear mixing (DRY) methods |
Instead of dissolving amines in solvents and impregnating porous supports through slow, waste-heavy processes, we use mechanical shear as the driving force. Intense mixing disperses liquid or semi-liquid amines directly onto solid supports, creating uniform, accessible amine layers without solvents, washing, or drying steps. Think of it as letting physics do the work chemistry usually complicates.
Why does solvent-free approach matter?
Because amine-supported sorbents are already one of the most promising materials for CO₂ capture, especially at low concentrations relevant to flue gas treatment or even direct air capture. Traditional impregnation routes are energy-intensive, generate chemical waste, and scale poorly outside the lab.
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| Demonstration of high-speed shear mixing preparation method |
High-speed shear mixing changes that equation. Preparation times are reduced from hours to around one minute. Solvents are completely eliminated. Amine loading remains high and well distributed, and the resulting materials show CO₂ adsorption capacities on par with—or better than—those made by conventional methods. Even more importantly, the sorbents hold up during repeated adsorption–desorption cycles, suggesting that the amines are mechanically stabilized rather than loosely “painted on.”
