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Environment

ACS Award For Team Innovation

by Andrea Widener
January 21, 2013 | A version of this story appeared in Volume 91, Issue 3

Sponsored by ACS Corporation Associates

A technology originally designed to treat contaminated water wasn’t an obvious choice to capture CO2 on submarines. But that unlikely transformation has won five scientists and engineers at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) this year’s award for innovative teamwork.

Caldwell
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Credit: David Spiel/PNNL
Photo of Dustin Caldwell of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.
Credit: David Spiel/PNNL

Team members Dustin Caldwell (age 33), April J. Carman (40), Glen E. Fryxell (52), Kenneth G. Rappé (41), and Thomas S. Zemanian (53) all contributed to the nearly decadelong project, which resulted in a safer—and less smelly—way to clean CO2 from naval submarines.

“Taking a process from the lab bench to a prototype addressing a critical national need in less than 10 years reflects a remarkable level of teamwork and talent,” says Thomas E. Bitterwolf, a University of Idaho chemistry professor and retired Navy commander who has worked with the group.

Fryxell
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Credit: Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Photo of Glen E. Fryxell of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.
Credit: Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

Submarines were not what Fryxell, a chemist, had in mind when he began a basic research project seeking a way to clean toxic mercury from contaminated groundwater at various Department of Energy sites.

Carman
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Credit: Deanna Auberry Photography
Photo of April J. Carman of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.
Credit: Deanna Auberry Photography

He came up with an adsorbent based on a glass honeycomb coated with a paint that sequesters the mercury. That technology, called SAMMS (self-assembled monolayers on mesoporous supports), was eventually licensed by the company Steward Advanced Materials and used for environmental cleanup.

Soon after SAMMS was developed, it became clear that the technology had other applications as well. By using different coatings, the glass honeycomb could trap other targeted chemicals. “Mercury is not the only chemical separation problem that DOE is facing,” Fryxell explains.

He and his colleagues, including chemical engineer Zemanian, experimented with SAMMS for a variety of projects: cleaning up volatile organic compounds, for example, and scrubbing CO2 out of smokestacks at power plants.

Rappé
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Credit: Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Photo of Kenneth G. Rappé of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.
Credit: Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Zemanian
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Credit: Courtesy of Thomas Zemanian
Photo of Thomas Zemanian of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.
Credit: Courtesy of Thomas Zemanian

A retired naval officer employed at PNNL heard that SAMMS could be used to capture and release CO2. He quickly thought of a major problem facing sailors on submarines.

The Navy wages a continuous battle to ensure a constant supply of oxygen on submarines by getting rid of the CO2 that sailors exhale. Submarines currently capture the CO2 by absorption using monoethanolamine, a liquid that is corrosive, must be used in large quantities, and needs to be replaced often. It also has a horrible odor, which can be a problem in the enclosed space of a submarine.

The first efforts to turn SAMMS into a submarine-scale scrubber began in 2005 with a small research project funded by PNNL. Zemanian was involved in the original talks with the Navy to figure out exactly what characteristics they were looking for in a new CO2 scrubber.

After a lab team showed that SAMMS could do the job on a small scale, the Navy stepped in with funding that moved the project along from basic research to an engineering effort. Carman, a chemist, managed the group, which at its peak included a dozen different scientists and engineers.

The project had two parts: increasing the performance of the SAMMS technology itself to remove more CO2 and building the engineering infrastructure that would make the technology work in a submarine’s air-handling system.

“The eight-year, multidisciplinary effort grew to involve synthetic chemistry, materials science, physical chemistry, chemical engineering, and systems engineering—and it would have failed without these scientists working together as a team,” explains John P. LaFemina, director of institutional strategy at PNNL.

The biggest challenge for the PNNL scientists was the transition from basic research to a full-scale prototype. “We don’t do an enormous amount of work at scales that large or take projects from inception to deployment,” explains Rappé, a chemical engineer who worked on both sides of the development.

So they started small. The first step was a tabletop model that could remove enough CO2 to keep a rat alive. Next was a model with one-tenth the required capacity of a submarine. After that, they built a small-scale shipboard unit that they placed in a sub to test the SAMMS materials under relevant conditions. Caldwell, a mechanical engineer, helped install one of the devices on a Navy submarine.

The final PNNL product was a full-scale prototype—called the advanced carbon dioxide removal unit (ACRU)—that is currently being reengineered to Navy standards by a third party. After testing and approval by the Navy, the team hopes to get ACRUs built into the next generation of submarines and, possibly, to retrofit them onto older subs. Steward, PNNL’s partner on the original SAMMS technology, will provide the SAMMS sorbent material.

And the team that made it happen is enjoying seeing a decade of work start to make life in submarines easier.

“A couple hundred people have had their hands in this over the last eight years, but five were consistently the main players,” Carman says. “It was exciting to see it all come together.”

The team will present the award address before the ACS Division of Industrial & Engineering Chemistry.

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