Harnessing sonolysis for CO₂ conversion and catalytic sonohydrogen production
摘要
Carbon dioxide (CO2), the gas known to be responsible for global warming, is a chemically stable compound. Transforming CO2 into a usable product is an energy intensive process. Many of the CO2 conversion processes also need hydrogen as a co-reactant to produce CO2-derived products. The energy and hydrogen that are used for CO2 conversion need to be renewable for an environmentally sustainable process. At present, the sustainable utilization of CO2 to produce CO2-derived products at a large scale is expensive and cannot compete with fossil-based conventional pathways to produce the same end product. CO2 has great potential as low-cost and non-hazardous feedstock, if it is converted economically to hydrocarbons. Therefore, there is a need to develop and deploy novel technologies for the conversion of CO2 to hydrocarbon using renewable energy and green hydrogen at competitive cost. Sonolysis is one such technology, that has attracted the attention of many researchers in recent years. In Sonolysis, ultrasound is employed to induce cavitation in a liquid medium. The cavitation leads to the production of multiple microscopic bubbles in a specially designed reactor. When these bubbles collapse, there is a generation of intense heat at high pressure, which can facilitate chemical reactions. The sonolysis can be used effectively as a standalone technology for chemical reactions or in combination with other existing processes to improve the overall efficiency of the processes. Two such applications, in the context of climate change mitigation, are the production of hydrogen and the conversion of CO2 to hydrocarbons. The main target of this paper is to assess the potential of sonolysis technology for CO2 utilization and to address the scale-up challenges toward commercial deployment of the technology.