3.17.22-Madrid-Peter-Godart

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  Communities around the world face continual disruption to critical electricity and potable water infrastructure due to severe storms, wildfires, and other natural disasters that are becoming more frequent and potent due to climate change. At the same time, many such communities see their local ecosystems being polluted due to poor waste management, especially as debris from severe weather events causes waste streams to surge in volume. Instead of compounding the issue, what if debris and other refuse could be converted into clean fuels locally to power the generation of critical resources when they would otherwise be inaccessible? Aluminum, for example, is the most abundant metal on earth and is widely used in nearly every industry. Currently global recycling rates are limited by complications with sorting waste by alloy content, lack of economic incentive, and the recent restriction of waste exports to other countries. As a result, several million tons of aluminum are landfilled each year in the US alone, leaving a significant amount of potential energy sitting idle and unused. A new alternative strategy to managing this waste is to turn it into an energy-dense fuel that reacts exothermically with water to produce hydrogen and boehmite, a valuable byproduct used in various industrial and pharmaceutical processes. When exposed to air, bulk aluminum develops an oxide layer that prevents it from reacting with water at practical temperatures; however, recent research at MIT has shown that a minimal surface treatment of gallium and indium can disrupt the oxide layer at the grain boundaries, allowing this reaction to proceed to >95% completion. In this talk, I discuss my research on the science and engineering of turning energy-dense scrap aluminum into a water-reactive fuel for clean hydrogen generation, as well as provide a thermodynamic perspective on plastic and biomass waste streams and how they might be leveraged in a similar way to make climate adaptation and mitigation more effective and equitable.

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