Bearing responsibility for the environment
Under the covers
Dr Shanlin Qiao, from Hebei University of Science and Technology in China, speaks to us about his nanosized carbon-capture nets, and how his three year-old niece helped him to come up with a striking Polymer Chemistry cover image.
The rapid consumption of fossil fuels has caused the emission of large amounts of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, forcing various environmental agencies to encourage the development of new cost-effective technologies to combat global warming.
A potential short-term strategy for dealing with the negative effects of fossil fuel use – until more green energy technologies are established – is to remove greenhouse gases such as CO2 from the atmosphere and store them away.
We all know that the CO2 molecule is very small – we can’t pick it up and put it in the dustbin. So it’s an interesting problem: can we capture CO2 molecules like a butterfly in a net?
We designed a net made from microporous organic polymers (MOPs), which have a pore width of less than 2 nm – similar to the size of CO2 molecules – making them a good candidate for gas capture and sequestration by a simple physical sieving process.
This process provides a smaller energy penalty and associated cost than the current state-of-the-art gas uptake methods.
In our paper we demonstrate which types of MOPs are best at carrying out this “gas butterfly” capture.
From the art desk
When I was a child my family lived on the beach of the Yellow River. My childhood memories are full blue sky, green grass, thick, loose snow and cute animals… Now all of this has disappeared and instead there are tall buildings, large factories, and a chimney working around the clock. Last time I went back to my homeland I was wondering where the clean, well-lit place of my mind had gone.
I wanted the cover image to show the importance of working to improve our communal environment, for the future and for our offspring. We need to guide and educate our children to reverse the deterioration of the environment.
Several days after I was asked to design the cover image for Polymer Chemistry, I still hadn’t made any progress, so I asked my three-year-old niece:
"Where is the cleanest place on earth in your mind?"
She said, "The bear house at the zoo".
I was surprised and said, "Why do you think the bear house at the zoo is the cleanest place?"
She said, "Because the bear is white, if the playground is not clean, he will dirty his body…"
"Hahaha, good answer!"
That conversation inspired me to design the bear characters along with my coworkers Dr Qing Li and Professor Xiaoyun Li.
Read the article: Haining Liu et al, Polym. Chem., 2017, 8, 6733–6740, DOI: 10.1039/C7PY01268C
This image appears on the back cover of Polymer Chemistry, 2017, Issue 44.
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