Advances in carbon fiber and graphene tech: The higher purpose in higher value carbon products

Today we’d like to highlight advances in the production and use of higher-value forms of carbon as examples of a society slowly moving away from a hunter-gatherer culture in energy and materials and towards a pastoral and agricultural approach.

Specifically we’ll look at clean, cost-efficient approaches of producing carbon fiber from biomass — including applications and value — and at the potential use of graphene in nanotechnology.

Carbon fiber advancing

A few weeks back, the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy selected Western Research Institute for a $3.7M award to develop low cost carbon fiber components using various resources as the feedstock. With partner cost share included, the overall value of the project as proposed is nearly $7 million.

Now, Southern Research Institute has joined the project to provide renewable acrylonitrile — the key raw material needed to produce the highest quality carbon fibers — produced from biomass-derived second generation sugars.

Why carbon fiber? First, it’s a strong, lightweight material that can replace steel and other heavier metals. The bottom line? It can lower the cost and improve performance of fuel-efficient vehicles and renewable energy components such as wind turbine blades.

Southern Research’s Amit Goyal, the group’s manager for Sustainable Chemistry and Catalysis, spearheaded the development of an innovative, thermocatalytic process that converts second generation sugars obtained from biomass to acrylonitrile. This direct drop-in replacement for petroleum acrylonitrile that is both economically competitive and sustainable, lowering greenhouse gas emissions by up to 40 percent.

“Ninety percent of the world’s carbon fiber production utilizes acrylonitrile as a raw material, growing at 11 to 18 percent per year. Due to the high growth rate of carbon fiber production, any reduction on GHG will be highly impactful,” Goyal said.

More on this project and the group of awards made this summer by DOE, here.

The carbon fiber backstory

We reported in May on a Texas A&M project “to overcome one of the industry’s most challenging issues by discovering how to make good quality carbon fiber from waste,” as Dr. Joshua Yuan, Texas A&M AgriLife Research scientist put it.  Yuan’s research team envisions a multi-stream integrated biorefinery producing high density carbon fibers and the low density bioplastics, along with biofuels.

We also reported on a five-year, $1.68M Aalto University project in Finland aiming at the manufacturing of high-quality carbon fibers from wood. The hybrid fibers are manufactured using the Ioncell-F spinning technology developed by Aalto University Professor Herbert Sixta’s research group. IMore on that here.

And tying into this Southern Research Institute advance, we reported on a 2014 DOE project to stimulate production of renewable carbon fiber. SRI picked up  to $5.9M to innovate on a multi-step catalytic process for conversion of sugars from non-food biomass to acrylonitrile. In the same award round, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory was awarded up to $5.3M to investigate and optimize multiple pathways to bio-acrylonitrile.

The two projects sought to demonstrate new biomass conversion technologies that enable the manufacturing of acrylonitrile—an essential feedstock for high-performance carbon fiber—for less than $1 per pound.

Graphene’s Potential in Nanotechnology

Meanwhile, let’s look at graphene for a moment.

Graphene is nearly 200 times stronger than steel, flexible, nearly transparent and highly conductive. It’s also extremely lightweight and it just couldn’t be thinner, since it is composed of a single layer of carbon atoms connected in a hexagonal pattern. Accordingly, a number of researchers have been working on developing nanotech applications, and especially there has been interest in nanodevices for biomedical applications.

And there’s one other attribute of great interest. Graphene has the ability to store electric charges is attracting the attention of technologies. This feature is largely derived from graphene’s high amount of surface area relative to its volume. As Tzahi Cohen-Karni, assistant professor of BME and materials science and engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, explained: “High surface-to-volume is necessary to make thin-film supercapacitors that can be used in miniaturized circuits. and supercapacitors can store and deliver electric charge much, much faster than batteries.

The graphene backstory

We previously reported on that Carbon Upcycling Technologies has been named a semi-finalist in the $10M NRG COSIA Carbon XPRIZE aiming to produce graphene nanoplatelets from power station CO2, here.

In October 2015, we reported that researchers at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) have embarked upon research looking at biomaterials for use in hydrogen fuel cells to replace toxic materials such as platinum. By mixing enzymes with graphene bound to a protein, the team believe it can find a solution that is more environmentally friendly and ultimately cheaper than current hydrogen fuel cells.

Applications for graphene in the world of biofuels? Look no further than Oak Ridge’s investigations into reverse combustion, with High-Selectivity Electrochemical Conversion of CO2 to Ethanol using a Copper Nanoparticle/N-Doped Graphene Electrode.” and you can find it here.

In the world of high performance chemicals, we’ve seen work from Graphene NanoChem developing applications of graphene, and we reported that their PlatClear, the Group’s waste-based second generation biofuel and the Group’s Senawang chemicals facility (“Senawang”) have both received approval from EPA for sale into the US market.

And we reported in June that SynTech Bioenergy completed the installation of its newest facility which will convert pecan shells into electricity in Texas.  Five similar plants are currently operating on walnut shells in California; the first plant dates back to 2008. The only byproduct of the technologies is organic biochar which can be further processed into graphene.

A potential competitor is nanocellulose, and Gizmodo warned “Watch out, graphene” and described nanocellulose as the “kevlar-strength, super-light, greenhouse gas-eating nanomaterial of the future.” More on that here.

The self-sustained system

“Imagine a self-sustained system, where the power is supplied to the nanosensing unit from 3-D graphene-based super capacitors.” Cohen-Karni added. “Someday we could have sensors that measure hormone or toxin levels, and you’d never have to replace the battery.”

In moving towards that family of apps, questions emerged about the pushing that surface-to-volume ratio, and whether graphene is safe for neurons and non-neuronal cells  In other words, can you put it in the body over the long term, and will it have that supercapacitator quality when you do so?

The answer appears to be “yes” according to another Carnegie Mellon University researcher, Ge Yang, an associate professor of biomedical engineering (BME) and computational biology, who confirms that graphene has ‘long-term biocompatibility.’

But what about the surface-to-volume ratio? One limitation to date, graphene has only been grown in big sheets, in 2D. Now, Carnegie Mellon reports that Cohen-Karni’s team was successful in growing graphene in 3-D. As Cohen-Karni explained, “Until this study, all of the graphene that people have grown are pinned to a surface — it exposes 2-D topology, and you don’t get the advantage of high surface-to-volume ratio that one could achieve if it were grown in 3-D.”

The Bottom Line

These story lines offer an opportunity to consider what a wrenching experience the shift must have been, millenia ago, from a hunter-gatherer society towards pastoralism and agricultural approaches to food production.

In classrooms — usually because we have little insight into the timing and local impacts of the agricultural revolution of the past — the Agricultural Revolution is presented as a seamless advance based on a universally acclaimed new technology (growing food crops from saved, planted seeds and cuttings).

“Here’s our fantastic new set of seed technologies,” said the paleogrowers. “Why, please take our hunting fields and dominate us politically and economically for all time,” replied the compliant paleo hunter-gatherers.

Um…not really, in all probability.

The experience of our own time in energy and materials suggests that the hunter-gatherers did not go gentle into the night. When agriculturalists promoted sustainability and long-term reliability, the hunter-gatherers pointed to cost. “Huntin’ is cheaper than growin’,”  as they might have noted at the time, and as we still hear today from advocates of petroleum exploration.

What may have changed the debate between the hunters (and their successors, the pastoral nomads) and the agriculturalists — what we can expect became a violent conflict that we have echoes of in the Book of Genesis — was the emergence of higher-value crops and materials and processes.

The hunter-gatherers and pastoralists might have had a strong set of arguments against basic food agriculture — but hunters couldn’t make wine in large quantities and agriculturalists could. Another echo we see in the Book of Genesis where the very first industrialist of any type we meet — and ultimately, after the Flood, becomes the populator of the earth. Yes, that’s Noah, a winemaker.

Good for Noah — who we remember for many things but we might also hail for pioneering the way towards the smaller-volume, higher-value niches that continue to provide “pioneer products” for industries from consumer electronics, to cars, and to the advanced bioeconomy’s materials and specialty chemicals.

Noah was a pioneer who said “why make low-priced grapes when you can make high-priced wines?” Elon Musk owes Noah some kudos for showing the way.