Engineering: Fully Funded M2A MSc by Research Scholarship: Investigation of CO2 Capture Materials

Start date: October 2022

Expected interview date: June 2022

Academic supervisors: Dr Enrico Andreoli  and Dr Shirin Alexander

Industrial supervisor: Dr Anne-Sophie Farle

Sponsoring company: Skytree

Skytree is a spinout from the European Space Agency Human Spaceflight Programme and a leader in direct air capture (DAC) of carbon dioxide. We were recently included in the 100 Most Innovative Companies in the Netherlands and are applying our technology to redefine the carbon ecosystem.

Based in Amsterdam’s Science Park we are a team of scientists, engineers, designers, and business developers who are working on creating better air for a viable future and on closing the carbon loop.

As part of our ongoing work to continuously improve and optimize our products, this project will be critical for establishing connections between intrinsic material properties and system level performance of CO2  capture sorbents. 

CO2  capture technologies are critical to preserve the environment and our daily lives and contribute towards the journey to decarbonisation. The use of sorbents presents an opportunity to control both capture and release of CO2  for a wide range of applications across multiple sectors, above all those of energy and industrial manufacturing. The technique involves capture through the adsorption of CO2  onto porous solids whilst desorption enables the use of the CO2  for alternative applications.

Project Aims:

The goal of the project is to understand the degradation and performance of materials for CO2  capture over time. The adsorption and desorption mechanisms of different sorbent materials shall be characterized under varying environmental conditions, to identify critical factors affecting their long-term performance. Multiple physical, chemical, and mechanical characterization techniques may be applied to correlate CO2  capture performance to physical or chemical changes in the materials. These key insights will flow directly into the optimization of our products.

The project will be implemented in the state-of-the-art research facilities of the Faculty of Science and Engineering of Swansea University. We look forward to having an enthusiastic and creative student joining us with the opportunity to visit Skytree in Amsterdam to interface with the team and get the chance to apply their insights to in-house testing and simulation work.