Scientists have now discovered a special computer algorithm that may be able to find new compounds which can take away the excess Carbon Dioxide from the air.
The Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere is growing every day and this is because of our continued use of things like fossil fuels. This means that even after we find alternative sources of energy, there will still be too much carbon dioxide already present in the air which could potentially cause problems for many years ahead.
Scientists think they have a solution to fix climate change: atmospheric carbon capture. This would mean taking carbon dioxide out of the air and storing it away forever. To do this, scientists are developing technologies that use compounds called amines that are especially good at collecting carbon dioxide. The better these compounds are, the more we can stop climate change by collecting tons of extra carbon dioxide.
Researchers from the National Energy Technology Laboratory and the University of Kentucky used a special type of computer, called quantum computing, to research different amine reactions. This method can help to quickly find useful compounds for capturing carbon. All these findings were published in the AIP Publishing book called AVS Quantum Science.
The author, Qing Shao, said we’re not happy with the amine molecules we use to do our carbon capture process. It’ll be very costly if we try to find a new molecule for this process with the help of classical computing resources. That’s why our goal is to come up with an efficient way to pick the right molecule out of thousands of possible different possibilities.
Figuring out how chemicals react requires examining the interactions between all sets of atoms. Even for a small molecule like carbon dioxide bonding with ammonia, which is just four atoms, there are hundreds of tiny atomic interactions going on. This can be really hard to figure out using regular computers – but quantum computers are great at this sort of problem!
Quantum computers are still developing and not powerful enough to solve complex tasks yet. This is why this group created an algorithm which can be used on current quantum computers to understand larger molecules and reactions better, helping with real world problems such as carbon capture. Yuhua Duan, one of the authors, said they are using the existing technology to try and tackle environmental issues.
This passage is about a research paper that was published by Manh Tien Nguyen, Yueh-Lin Lee, Dominic Alfonso, Qing Shao, and Yuhua Duan in March 2023. It’s title is “Description of reaction and vibrational energetics of CO2-NH3 interaction using quantum computing algorithms”.
