Microwave Irradiation Intensified Process for Scalable Functional Device Assembly
- 3D Array Technology, LLC, Storrs, CT (United States)
The environment pollution is a serious issue worldwide for human beings, which calls for ever-increasing demand towards environmental protection. Efficient enabling and utilization of various functional devices represent an essential solution to pursue the environment sustainability. Nanotechnology is emerging as an effective approach to improve the efficiency of functional devices for a variety of environmental applications. For example, the nanomaterials-based catalysts are being widely used in air pollution control, enabling catalysts with significantly enhanced performance. Scalable integration of functional nanostructural entities such as nanoparticles, nanowires, nanosheets into applicable three-dimensional (3-D) platform holds the keys of industrial-relevant manufacture of high-efficiency catalytic devices for emission control. Among all the integration approaches, the wet-chemical based integration is one of the top options due to its advantages in low-cost, flexibility in substrate geometry and composition, ease of operation, and high repeatability. The wet-chemical based processes usually require continuous heating to initiate the chemical reactions, which is regularly achieved by conventional resistive heating. However, such conventional heating method is plaqued by a poor heating efficiency. Moreover, the conventional heating is not suitable for those substrates with three-dimensional (3D) or complex geometry since it hardly provides sufficient heat transfer and mass transport within substrates, leading to poor uniformity of nanostructure deposition and low production rate. Thus, there is urgent demand to develop high-efficiency wet-chemical based integration strategy for nanostructured functional devices. In this project, a novel microwave-irradiation-intensified hydrothermal manufacturing process was developed for scalable manufacture of nanostructured monolithic catalytic devices. A wide array of metal oxide nanostructured coatings has been in situ grown on various 3D substrates for emission control applicaitons such as cordierite honeycombs and silicon carbide honeycomb. The growth efficiency, production rate, and distribution uniformity of nanostructure coatings obtained from microwave heating and conventional heating are investigated, which reveals the boosting effect of microwave irradiation on hydrothermal reactions. The silicon carbide honeycomb is found to be more favorable to microwave adsorption in contrast to cordierite honeycomb, and the corresponding reaction mechanism is studied. The obtained catalysts are used for catalytic oxidation of Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs), showing excellent catalytic performance at low temperature for various compounds. As the proof of concept, the design of integrated manufacturing system for the microwave irradiation assisted continuous production of nanostructure array based monolithic catalysts is presented, which holds the key to mass production of monolithic catalysts in near future.
- Research Organization:
- 3D Array Technology, LLC, Storrs, CT (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE Office of Science (SC)
- DOE Contract Number:
- SC0018890
- OSTI ID:
- 1542455
- Type / Phase:
- SBIR (Phase I)
- Report Number(s):
- DOE-3DAT-SC0018890
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
Similar Records
Solvent effects on the heterogeneous growth of TiO2 nanostructure arrays by solvothermal synthesis
Nano-Array Integrated Structured Catalysts: A New Paradigm upon Conventional Wash-Coated Monolithic Catalysts?