This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Developing new materials to tackle pressing global issues is a gap-filled process that can leave potential climate solutions lost in unread academic papers and forgotten dissertations. A new end-to-end, machine-learning-guided workflow created in the lab of UChicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering and Department of Chemistry professor Laura Gagliardi is helping smooth the path from academic idea to manufacture-ready reality in a single discovery process.
Through the Center for Advanced Materials for Environmental Solutions (CAMES), which Gagliardi co-directs, the lab used this new process to create two high-performing materials for separating methane from nitrogen. These new zinc-based metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), UCHI-1 and UCHI-2 (named for the University of Chicago but pronounced "you-key" one and two), provide state-of-the-art gas adsorption and separation through a smoother, more efficient, less costly path from design to debut. The work was published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.
The Gagliardi Group collaborated with UChicago chemistry professor John Anderson and Anderson Lab postdoctoral scholar Jianheng (Allen) Ling to synthesize the two new materials envisioned through this process. This experimental work is fundamental to closing the loop with computational predictions and, most importantly, to creating materials that can be tested for potential industrial applications. "The end-to-end framework we created connects data mining, machine-learning predictions, materials design, synthesis, and experimental validation in a single discovery cycle," Gagliardi said.
"This helps overcome a major barrier in computational materials discovery: Many theoretically promising materials are never synthesized, while experimental development traditionally relies on slow and costly trial and error." Although MOFs are also proving to be powerful tools for fighting airborne carbon dioxide, the team chose to focus on a less-studied greenhouse gas—methane. Methane from agriculture, especially livestock, as well as landfills, coal mining, and oil and natural gas operations, stays in the atmosphere for about a decade, compared with the thousands of years CO2 can linger. But during that time, it does massive damage.
Over a 20-year time scale, methane has a climate impact 80 times greater than CO2. "Methane as a greenhouse gas is more potent than CO2, but it has not been considered as much because it stays in the atmosphere for a shorter time than CO2," said Gagliardi Group postdoctoral researcher Andrea Darù, the paper's first author. "Improving how we capture methane will also benefit industry and jobs.
Industry leaks methane at a loss of about $10 billion per year through pipes, compression machines and anything related to methane gas distribution." In the traditional process for designing and building new materials, computational groups devise and describe potentially interesting molecular designs. An experimental group must then pick up the work, create the materials and test them. Industry must ultimately incorporate the material into a product—the final step in bringing an academic idea into the real world.
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