Northwestern granted $3.3 million from DOE to study carbon capture systems: Professor Omar Farha principal investigator on the project

Northwestern University has been granted $3.3 million in funding from the U.S. Department of Energy to explore and develop new methods of capturing carbon emissions directly from the air. The Department announced this August that they will provide more than $24 million for nine different research projects concerning emissions.

Researchers from Northwestern will work to examine how the dynamic behavior of promising carbon capture systems impacts the systems’ ability to capture and release carbon dioxide. Professor Omar Farha, of the Department of Chemistry, is the principal investigator on the project. He also is a member of Northwestern’s International Institute for Nanotechnology.

“Understanding how a sorbent works is fundamentally important for making the next generation of highly selective and stable sorbents for CO₂ capture,” said Farha. “We are excited to apply our state-of-the-art experimental and computational tools to tackle this complex challenge.”

Farha and his team will use state-of-the-art experimental techniques to monitor and analyze CO₂ capture and release cycles as they occur, and their use of computational chemistry will aid in the analysis of these observations. They aim to study the chemical and structural changes that metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) undergo during CO₂ capture and release cycles, which is necessary for developing MOF sorbents for long-term direct air capture applications.

Read more about this project in Northwestern Now.