Carbon Capture, Utilization and Sequestration

Climate, water, energy, and food are essential for human well-being, poverty reduction, and sustainable development. Global climate change creates critical challenges by increasing temperatures, reducing snowpack, and changing precipitation patterns for water, energy, and food, as well as ecosystem processes at regional scales. Ecosystem services provide life support, goods, and natural resources from water, energy, and food, as well as the environment. However, knowledge gaps are resulting from a lack of conceptual frameworks and practices to interlink major climate change drivers of water resources with the climate-water-energy-food nexus and related ecosystem processes. The Tang group is part of a multinational collaboration aimed at developing materials that decarbonize the atmosphere. Teaming with diverse researchers, we study solid adsorbent materials that capture carbon dioxide from the air or the exhaust streams of industrial processes. 

I have created solid adsorbent polymer materials that capture carbon dioxide from the air or exhaust streams of industrial processes. I developed and integrated diverse cutting-edge atomic-level toolboxes, including multidimensional and multinuclear quantitative solid-state NMR spectroscopy (1D SS-NMR (13CP/MAS, 1H) and 2D SS-NMR (2D Heteronuclear Correlation Spectroscopy-HETCOR, 2D 1H NMR Spin Diffusion)), atomic engineering, Cryo-EM, S/TEM atomic resolution imaging, electron energy loss spectroscopy (EELS), X-ray spectroscopy/microscopy, and synchrotron-XAS/computed micro-tomography/SAXS techniques, density-functional theory (DFT), molecular dynamics simulation, and gas adsorption methods. These tools were used to investigate how polymers adsorb target gas molecules (CO2) with high affinity and selectivity, as well as to reveal the unique interatomic interactions between CO2 and sustainable materials.​