Date: 22 November 2024, 13:00-14:00 CET
Title: Combustion-generated Carbonaceous Nanoparticles: From Air Pollutants to Functional Materials
Speaker: Georgios A. Kelesidis, Delft University of Technology, Delft, Netherlands
Abstract: Combustion-generated carbonaceous nanoparticles (CNPs) are both a nuisance and a blessing: Soot from fossil fuel combustion and wildfires is a major global warming and toxic pollutant but has a lifetime of 2-10 days in the atmosphere. So eliminating it provides an immediate relief and buys time to develop technologies to capture the longer living CO2 emissions. On the other hand, carbon black (CB), the largest nanostructured material produced industrially by fuel oil combustion, is a key component of energy storage devices that are crucial for CO2-free transportation. A research frontier lies in the close control of the CNP morphology and internal porosity that determine the impact of soot emissions on climate and public health, as well as the performance of CB in batteries and supercapacitors.
Here, state-of-the-art experimental platforms and novel computational algorithms are used to advance the current understanding of the CNP structural dynamics during combustion. Soot nanoparticles having similar morphology with aircraft emissions are produced by a burner for enclosed spray combustion of kerosene that emulates the rich-quench-lean concept of jet engines. The high throughput generation of aircraft-like soot emissions using this burner enables the detailed characterization of the soot internal porosity and health effects. The oxidation dynamics of such soot in the lean zone of kerosene combustion are elucidated to facilitate the efficient elimination of aircraft soot emissions by a judicious air injection. Similarly, oxidation of CB at well-controlled conditions enhances the internal particle porosity and the performance of CB in supercapacitors. The detailed characterization of the CNP structure enables the derivation and validation of a lattice Monte Carlo model for evolution of the CB and soot porosity during oxidation. This can assist the design of soot-free combustion engines, as well as the synthesis novel CB grades for advanced energy storage systems of electric and hybrid vehicles.
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