Mohammad Rahimi
University of Houston, TX·Engineering·Early-career
Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions drive global warming, and capturing CO2 before it reaches the air is one way to cut them. Most capture systems today use heat to release the trapped CO2.
- Fields
Engineering
Chemistry
- Topics
electrochemical carbon capture
CO2 separation
decarbonization
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2029
What they work on
- Engineer soft liquid-liquid interfaces between two immiscible electrolyte solutions that separate CO2 electrochemically without costly ion-selective membranes and with less sensitivity to oxygen gas.
- Optimize these engineered interfaces for better CO2 separation performance and lower energy use in an electrochemical carbon capture process.
- Measure interface performance with scanning electrochemical microscopy, which maps chemical reactions across a surface at very small scales, to guide interface design.
More about the research
That takes a lot of energy and slowly breaks down the materials that absorb the gas. Electrochemical carbon capture (ECC) uses electricity instead. It runs at moderate temperatures, can be built in modular plug-and-play units, and can run on renewable power. However, current ECC designs depend on costly ion-selective membranes, which let only certain charged particles pass, and they are sensitive to oxygen gas.
Why it matters
Capturing CO2 from emissions is one route to slowing climate change, but heat-based capture uses a lot of energy and wears out its materials. A membrane-free electrochemical process that runs on electricity, possibly from renewables, could make carbon capture cheaper, more modular, and more sustainable for emitters. The interface designs may also inform electrochemical water treatment and energy storage.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Ling Fei
University of Louisiana at Lafayette, LA·Engineering
Develop molten carbonate fuel cells with three-dimensional electrodes that concentrate CO2 while producing electricity, aiming for better performance and stability.
Lane Baker
Texas A&M University-College Station, TX·Chemistry
Build Optically Guided Nanoscale Electrochemical Imaging (OG-NEI), hardware and protocols that combine scanned-probe electrochemical imaging with bright field, dark field and fluorescence optical imaging at the same time.
Zhange Feng
University of Nevada-Las Vegas, NV·Chemistry
Gather preliminary data on electrochemical energy storage and electrochemical CO2 reduction, which turns carbon dioxide into other chemicals, as groundwork for a full research center.
The school
University of Houston: 21 labs on PI Pages, $239M a year on research, 374 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
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