lingxkong
commented
3 months ago This idea is unrelated to the metallic construct of the device/sorbent panel frame, and instead, has more to do with the fact that the sorbent 3D footprint is quite thick (1.5 inches). Due to sorbent being a non-conductive material, and a single set of zigzagging wires heating the whole volume, we want to test a thinner slab of sorbent volume without rebuilding the entire sorbent panel construct. Additionally, a thinner slab will reduce the air pass-through resistance through sorbent that may be moderately tightly packed.
The overall idea is to build an insert that can be inserted into the current sorbent compartment that has a screen. Perhaps this frame would be made of wood for easy manufacturability, and also have higher temperature tolerance than plastics (glass transition temperature for some plastics is around 120C), and the screen be mounted in the middle to simply halve the thickness of the sorbent compartment.
(please excuse the hand-drawn)
This wooden frame should have pretty snug fit inside the compartment in all three dimensions to ensure that the sorbent is not migrating to the other half of the compartment, and some adjusting and configurations will be necessary to get this new fixture to play well with the existing clevis pins.
Note that while it would be ideal to make a frame that has an adjustable screen position, this would significantly increase the engineering complexity of such fixture. It is better to make multiple fixtures, such as one that has the screen at the half-way point, resulting in a 0.75 inch thick sorbent compartment, and one that that has the screen at the 0.5 inch mark, engineer it to be flippable/reversible, and therefore capable of testing a 1-inch thick and a 0.5 inch thick compartment.
The last note is on the expansion of the sorbent compartment in the X- and Y- directions (whereas the above idea is regarding the compression of the Z-direction). although it would be ideal to expand the length and width of the sorbent compartment, it would be a complex change and should be a task saved for later. On expansion, multiple pieces of hardware would need to be re-engineered, re-fabricated, and re-configured with no guarantee of new eye-opening learnings (i.e., we know that increasing the window size should increase the capture rate, but that's obvious. We want to learn about the non-obvious if we were to do a re-design and apply all learnings toward the re-design).
Achieving high energy efficiency is critical to arriving at a net-positive emissions balance. If we use too much power, that could overwhelm the climate benefit of removing CO2 with the same device. With the first build a lot of the precious heat generated to desorb the sorbent was absorbed by the metal that makes up the sorbent panel. We need to figure out a way to reduce this “thermal vampirism” so that more heat goes directly to the sorbent.
https://youtu.be/f3UlfJ3lYFI