Earth's temperature is rising. In the meantime, there is a lot of practice around the world, with global warming. The rate at which it is growing may vary. But there is no doubt that warming is increasing. More responsible for the warming is CO2, in addition, excepts for animals which are come out from various factories, thermal power plants, planes and ships & being emitted from the excess number of cars & trucks and mixed with air. Carbon-di-oxide (CO2) is being emitted from the forest-fire (Amazon's forest-fire, Australia's forest-fire etc) and is being added to the atmosphere. On the other hand, the forest area is gradually decreasing. The situation is such that all factories, even if we control cars & trucks, but warming still will continue. Only the tree itself will not be able to solve this problem. So the search for alternative routes is underway.
We know that the tree takes CO2 from the air and produces food and oxygen for the animals. Following this, efforts are being made to create artificial trees. Some years ago, Klaus Lackner, a physicist and engineer in Colombia University's, Dept. of Lenfest Center For Sustainable Energy, created an artificial tree, whose leaves look like plastic, and the top of the leaf is covered with sodium carbonate mixing resins. When the leaf is dry, this sodium carbonate absorbs a lot of Co2 gas from the air and deposits it in the leaf as sodium-bi-carbonate. Then the leaf releases CO2 when the water vapor flows over the leaf or submerges it in water. Again once dry, the leaf can absorb CO2 in a fresh way. In a chemical way, the CO2 gas that is obtained from the leaves can be converted into methanol, fuel oil and gas, plastic, etc.
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| Klaus Lackner |
According to Lackner, though sunlight is essential for real trees for photosynthesis, but for this artificial leaf sunlight is not essential. As a result, this artificial tree is active to take carbon-di-oxide at all times in day & night. He also demands that these artificial leaves can absorb CO2 thousand times more compare to the natural leaves and 10 crore such trees can absorb 1 ton of CO2 in a day. However, it has not yet been implemented in practical.
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| Emin Yu |
A team of researchers led by Professor Emin Yu of the Engineering Department of the Waterloo Institute for Nanotechnology has created a new kind of artificial leaf. Though it is not an artificial leaf, it follows the photosynthesis of real trees. He demands where natural trees produce glucose and oxygen, their trees produce methanol and oxygen. Again in a chemical way, from this methanol, they can produce fuel gas like ethane, propane, butane, diesel, gasoline, and also plastic. Since cuprous oxide is cheap, they use it as a chemical catalyst.
Many such types of research are being conducted in many research centers around the world. How to make fuel-oil or fuel-gas from CO2 and reduce the amount of CO2 in the air, which will play a great role to solve global warming problems in the coming days.
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