A football field in a teaspoon: New material has insane surface area
Using principles from rocket science, researchers have created carbon with a record-breaking surface area
The material can soak up about twice the amount of CO2 as current activated carbon materials and has impressive energy-storage capabilities. As you might remember from combining baking soda and vinegar to make a volcano in high school, when certain chemicals come in contact with each other, the results can be explosive.
Taking this principle to much more serious degrees, rocket scientists have been using something known as hypergolic reactions as fuel for a range of space craft for years. These are reactions between two chemicals (typically a fuel and an oxidizer) that are so violent that they can provide propulsion if channeled correctly. One of the more common combinations in the world of hypergolic propulsion, for instance, is mixing the fuel hydrazine with the oxidizer nitrogen tetroxide.
At Cornell University, postdoctoral researcher Nikolaos Chalmpes was using hypergolic reactions in a different way. He was creating materials from the powerful forces unleashed when various chemicals combined.
Thinking that such a technique might help increase the porosity of carbon, which would boost its surface area and make it better at storing energy and capturing carbon dioxide, Cornell professor Emmanuel Giannelis began working with Chalmpes on a new study.
“I was trying to understand how to harness and control these unexplored reactions for synthesizing various carbon nanostructures, and after adjusting various parameters, I discovered that we might be able to achieve ultrahigh porosity,” said Chalmpes, lead author of the study. “Until then, these reactions had only been used in rocket and aircraft systems, and deep space probes for propulsion and hydraulic power.”
The duo, with the help of a team of other scientists, was successful. They created carbon that has an astonishing surface area of 4,800 square meters per gram which, they say, is roughly equivalent to the size of a football field packed down neatly onto a teaspoon. “To the best of our knowledge, this area value is the highest reported in the literature,” write the researchers in their study, which has been published in the journal ACS Nano.
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