Smoke from Canadian wildfires repeatedly blanketed parts of the United States over the course of June, creating hazardous conditions for millions of Americans. At one point, Chicago and other regions in the Midwest ranked as the worst air quality in the world, according to the global pollution index.
Researchers at the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (PME) at the University of Chicago are working to address a myriad of global challenges around energy and sustainability as humans adapt to a changing climate, including enhanced sensor networks, development of sustainable fuels, and advancing clean energy through better supply chains.
A tool for monitoring a shifting climate
The goal of Prof. Supratik Guha is to create a sensor network that monitors the air, soil, and water for pollution and nutrient content.
Guha and his team are developing “wireless sensor networks”—sensor arrays that surveil acre-wide swathes of land and water to track pollution, moisture levels, and chemical composition. These systems, Guha believes, will unlock sorely needed data on the planet’s rapidly shifting composition.
“These sensor networks will provide real-time, high-density data that are essential to creating an accurate picture of an ecosystem,” said Guha, also a senior advisor at Argonne National Laboratory. “We want to see how rivers are being polluted, how much fertilizer is washing out of the soil. With better data, terrestrial ecologists can develop better nitrogen and carbon dioxide cycling models; farmers can use exactly the right amount of water at exactly the right time.”
“By deploying sensors unobtrusively across a field or, say, a national forest or a nature preserve, we can monitor water quality or soil temperature,” said PhD student Gregory Grant. “It’s a powerful tool to monitor for wildfire or help agricultural management. We can make informed decisions about hazards, water usage, fertilizer runoff, pollution—there’s so much we learn.”
A plentiful supply of clean energy is lurking in plain sight. It is the hydrogen we can extract from water (H2O) using renewable energy. Scientists are seeking low-cost methods for producing clean hydrogen from water to replace fossil fuels, as part of the quest to combat climate change.
A multi-institutional team led by the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory has developed a low-cost catalyst for a process that yields clean hydrogen from water. Proton exchange membrane (PEM) electrolyzers can split water into hydrogen and oxygen with higher efficiency at near room temperature. The reduced energy demand makes them an ideal choice for producing clean hydrogen by using renewable but intermittent sources, such as solar and wind.
“By using the cobalt-based catalyst prepared by our method, one could remove the main bottleneck of cost to producing clean hydrogen in an electrolyzer,” said Argonne scientist Di-Jia Liu, who holds a joint appointment at the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering.
For many materials critical to supply chains that will help enable America’s decarbonization transition, resources are limited. Traditional mining is fraught with challenges, so advancing clean energy depends on finding new ways to reliably access critical materials.
Water represents one underexplored avenue of acquiring these materials. Different types of water offer different kinds of material resources, said Seth Darling, a UChicago CASE senior scientist and fellow at the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering.
“The oceans are such a tremendous resource because the total quantities of many valuable and important materials are vast, but they are also highly dilute,” said Darling, also chief science and technology officer for Argonne’s Advanced Energy Technologies directorate. “Wastewater has also been in need of reframing — we want people to see that wastewater is not truly waste, rather, it’s rich with all sorts of valuable stuff.”
The technologies that Darling and his colleagues are exploring to extract critical materials from different types of water range from the traditional (like membranes) to the innovative (like interfacial solar steam generators).
The Pritzker Molecular Engineering integrates science and engineering to address some of humanity’s biggest global challenges from the molecular level up.