Scalable Jet-Based Fabrication of PEI-Hydrogel Particles for CO_(2)Capture

The capture,regeneration,and conversion of CO_(2)from ambient air and flue gas streams are critical aspects of mitigating global warming.Solid sorbents for CO_(2)absorption are very promising as they have high mass transfer areas without energy input and reduce emissions and minimize corrosion as compared to liquid sorbents.However,precisely tunable solid CO_(2)sorbents are difficult to produce.Here,we demonstrate the high-throughput production of hydrogel-based CO_(2)-absorbing particles via liquid jetting.By wrapping a liquid jet consisting of an aqueous solution of cross-linkable branched polyethylenimine(PEI)with a layer of suspension containing hydrophobic silica nanoparticles,monodisperse droplets with a silica nanoparticle coating layer was formed in the air.A stable Pickering emulsion containing PEI droplets was obtained after these ejected droplets were collected in a heated oil bath.The droplets turn into mm-sized particles after thermal curing in the bath.The diameter,PEI content,and silica content of the particles were systematically varied,and their CO_(2)absorption was measured as a function of time.Steam regeneration of the particles enabled cyclic testing,revealing a CO_(2)absorption capacity of 6.5±0.5 mol kg^(−1)solid PEI in pure CO_(2)environments and 0.7±0.3 mol kg^(−1)solid PEI for direct air capture.Several thousands of particles were produced per second at a rate of around 0.5 kg per hour,with a single nozzle.This process can be further scaled by parallelization.The complete toolbox for the design,fabrication,testing,and regeneration of functional hydrogel particles provides a powerful route toward novel solid sorbents for regenerative CO_(2)capture.

Local grid refinement in multigrid method for point contact problems of polycrystalline anisotropic material under dry and lubricated conditions

Predicting rolling bearing fatigue life requires knowledge of the three-dimensional(3D)stress fields in the roller and raceway near the lubricated contact.Owing to the increasingly severe operating conditions,the effect of localized features such as surface roughness,subsurface inclusions,and even the crystallographic structure of the material becomes important.Achieving such detail requires(locally)extremely dense gridding in simulations,which in 3D is a major challenge.Multigrid techniques have been demonstrated to be capable of solving such problems.In this study,multigrid techniques are shown to further increase the efficiency of the solution by exploiting local grid refinement while maintaining the simplicity of a uniform discretization.This is achieved by employing increasingly finer grids only locally,where the highest resolution is required.Results are presented for dry contact and elastohydrodynamically lubricated contact cases,circular as well as elliptic,with varying crystallographic structure,and with surface roughness.The results show that the developed algorithm is very well suited for detailed analysis,with also excellent prospects for computational diagnostics involving actual material crystallographic structure from electron backscatter diffraction measurements.