On today’s episode of “What If?” — what if the Apollo 13 astronauts had a 3D printer? Well, for one thing, they may have been able to avoid all the futzing with duct tape and procedure list covers to jury rig the lithium hydroxide filters, at least if they’d known about these 3D printed enzymatic CO2 filters. And time travel…they probably would have needed that too.
It’s a bit of an overstatement, yes. But environmental CO2 Scrubbing is one of the uses for what [Jialong Shen] et all Here’s what the Textile Engineering Department from North Carolina State University developed. The star of the show isn’t so much the 3D printing — although squirting out a bio-compatible aerogel and cross-linking it with UV light on the fly is pretty cool. The key to creating a CO2-scrubbing textile is carbonic anhydrase, or CA, a ubiquitous enzyme that’s central to maintaining acid-base homeostasis. CA is an enzyme that efficiently catalyzes adding water to carbon dioxide in order to produce hydrogen and bicarbonate ions. CA can convert up to 1,000,000 CO molecules into bicarbonate and hydrogen ions.2 CO emits a high number of molecules per second. This makes it a very attractive CO2 filter.
In the current work, an aerogel of poly(ethylene glycol) diacrylate/poly(ethylene oxide) (PEG-DA/EO) was used to entrap CA molecules, holding them in place in a polymer matrix to protect them from denaturation while still allowing access to gaseous CO2. The unlinked polymers, together with photoinitiators in a carbonic anhydrase solution, were extruded using a syringe-pump and fine nozzle. The resulting thread was blasted with 280–450 nm UV light, curing the thread instantly. The thread is wound into mono-filaments for weaving later or directly onto a 2D grid.
The filament performed well at CO2 The capture system was able to remove 24% of the gases from a mixture that passed over it. What’s more, the entrapped enzyme appears to be quite stable, surviving washes with various solvents and physical disruptions like twisting and bending. It’s an exciting development in catalytic textiles, and besides its obvious environmental uses, something like this could make cheap, industrial-scale bioreactors easier to build and run.
Photo Credits: [Sen Zhang] You can also find out more about the following: [Jialong Shen]NC State University [Rachel Boyd], Spectrum News 1
[via Phys.org]