Amazing stuff! This could indeed be a major breakthrough and a source of huge energy savings!
The still novel mechanochemical approach may also prove promising in other ways going forward.
Are the demagogues of the Global Warming Hoax and the Climate Change Religion paying attention! Human ingenuity is the solution not totalitarian tyrannical approaches!
"... The team has demonstrated that grinding certain amounts of certain powders with precise pressure levels of certain gases can trigger a mechanochemical reaction that absorbs the gas into the powder and stores it there, giving you what's essentially a solid-state storage medium that can hold the gases safely at room temperature until they're needed. The gases can be released as required, by heating the powder up to a certain point. ...
The process is repeatable ...
This process, for example, could separate hydrocarbon gases out from crude oil using less than 10% of the energy that's needed today. "Currently, the petrol industry uses a cryogenic process," ... "Several gases come up together, so to purify and separate them, they cool everything down to a liquid state at very low temperature, and then heat it all together. Different gases evaporate at different temperatures, and that's how they separate them out." ... Distillation as a whole is responsible for a massive 10-15% of global energy use. ...
Different gases ... are absorbed at different milling intensities, gas pressures and time periods. Once the first gas is absorbed into the powder, it can be removed, and the process can be re-run with a different set of parameters to trap and store the next gas. Likewise, some gases are released from the powders at higher temperatures than others, offering a second way to separate gases if they're stored together. ..."
This process, for example, could separate hydrocarbon gases out from crude oil using less than 10% of the energy that's needed today. "Currently, the petrol industry uses a cryogenic process," ... "Several gases come up together, so to purify and separate them, they cool everything down to a liquid state at very low temperature, and then heat it all together. Different gases evaporate at different temperatures, and that's how they separate them out." ... Distillation as a whole is responsible for a massive 10-15% of global energy use. ...
Different gases ... are absorbed at different milling intensities, gas pressures and time periods. Once the first gas is absorbed into the powder, it can be removed, and the process can be re-run with a different set of parameters to trap and store the next gas. Likewise, some gases are released from the powders at higher temperatures than others, offering a second way to separate gases if they're stored together. ..."
From the abstract:
"Light hydrocarbon olefin and paraffin gas mixtures are produced during natural gas or petrochemical processing. The petrochemical industry separates hydrocarbon gas mixtures by using an energy-intensive cryogenic distillation process, which accounts for 15% of global energy consumption. The development of a new energy-saving separation process is needed to reduce the energy consumption. In this research, we develop a green and low energy mechanochemical separation process in which boron nitride (BN) powders were ball milled at room temperature in the atmosphere of an alkyne or olefin and paraffin mixture gas. BN selectively adsorbs a much greater quantity of alkyne and olefin gas over paraffin gases, and thus the paraffin gas is purified after the ball milling process. The adsorbed olefin gas can be recovered from the BN via a low-temperature heating process. The mechanochemical process produces extremely high uptake capacities of alkyne and olefin gases in the BN (708 cm3/g for acetylene (C2H2) and 1048 cm3/g for ethylene (C2H4)) respectively. To the best of our knowledge, assisted by ball milling, BN nanosheets have achieved the highest uptake capacities for alkyne/olefin gases, which are superior to all other materials reported so far. Chemical analysis reveals that large amounts of olefin gases were quasi-chemically adsorbed on the in-situ formed BN nanosheets via C–N bond formation, whereas small amount of paraffin gases was physically adsorbed on BN nanoparticles. This scalable mechanochemical process has great potential as an industrial separation method and can realize substantial energy savings."
Tech breakthrough could make oil refineries greener, hydrogen safer Deakin University researchers have made a breakthrough that could help address one of the biggest barriers preventing the widespread adoption of hydrogen energy - safe storage and transport.
Superb storage and energy saving separation of hydrocarbon gases in boron nitride nanosheets via a mechanochemical process (no public access)
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