Several engineering companies say we have the technology to reverse climate change, one of which is using direct air capture. Interestingly, additive manufacturing has the potential to play a major role here. Scott Green, 3D Systems Principal Solutions Leader, and Matt Atwood, founder and CEO of Air Capture explore direct air capture and how additive manufacturing can help.
MPF:
First of all, briefly describe the challenges we face in reversing the changes we are experiencing through the climate.
Matt:
Sure, I’m happy to do that. The CO2 emissions from industry are a primary driver for climate change. One of the important things to understand about CO2 is that it has a long half-life in the atmosphere. A pulse of CO2 under the atmosphere typically lasts for about 150 years. So, one way to think about the effect of climate change that we’re feeling right now is that we’re only really feeling the effects of emissions from pre-1960. And the buildup of these emissions over time is problematic and growing.
When we look at the challenges of climate change, United Nations and other groups under the Paris Agreements have said, you must limit global warming to below two degrees centigrade from pre-industrial emissions. The challenges with meeting that target realistically mean that the only way to get it done is to pull CO2 from the air. It is no longer possible that we can solve the problem with renewables alone or with electrification.
So the building up of the capacity of direct air capture and similar technology that takes CO2 out of the atmosphere and retires it or makes something useful with it, such as many of the products we use in the industry today is on the critical path to avoiding the existential threat of climate change.
MPF:
Can you briefly describe what direct air capture technology is and how this technology benefits various industries and could even be an economic opportunity?
Matt:
Direct air capture simply is pulling CO2 out of the air and trying to do something useful with it. So, we build technology that has the ability to capture CO2 from the air, so it’s a challenging problem to solve and then make that CO2 available for industries. The global economy runs on carbon. It’s in everything we do. It’s in our building material, it’s in fuel, it’s in all of our food processing, plastic, and battery materials. Products across the board, it’s carbon-based.
The economic opportunity with emerging technologies of direct air capture is to be able to provide all those same materials that we use today, but rather having the carbon come from the ground, which increases global CO2 emission, increases the atmospheric loading CO2, we can pull the same carbon out of the air, make all those same products and do so in a carbon negative way, where ultimately we’re net reducing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. And so we view this as we think CO2 is not just a threat, it’s a major opportunity economically and direct air capture unlocks our ability to make those products.
MPF:
How do you capture the air?
Matt:
Well, the first rule in direct air capture is you have to move a lot of air. CO2 is very dilute in the air, so about 400 parts per million, which is 0.04% by volume. So you have to build the device that is a fan to move air through a contactor. In our case, we use ultra-low-pressure drop contactors. So the energy associated with the fan from moving the CO2 through contactors as low as possible. On that contactor, we have a special sorbent. The sorbent grabs the CO2 from the air, and then we release the sorbent, we release the CO2 from the sorbent by adding heat to that. And so the machine is a simple device that has a fan and contactors that rotate and collect CO2 from the air.
MPF:
What do you do with the carbon after you capture it, and what form is it in after you’ve separated it from the O2?
Matt:
Once we pull the CO2 out of the air, it’s just CO2 gas at one atmospheric pressure, and from there we can do many things. It can be used directly by greenhouses or food packaging applications. We can liquefy it, which is used heavily in beverages, sodas, and beers. It can be turned into dry ice, which is used to refrigerate as solid CO2. It can be sequestered into the ground, geologically. So, the CO2 is pumped underground, it stays there, but it can also be converted into other products. We can turn the CO2 into plastics, into fuel, into chemical precursors, battery-grade materials, a number of different products be made from the CO2.
MPF:
Where does additive manufacturing come in, in helping with direct air capture?
Scott:
Yeah, I can pipe in here. Yeah, thanks Matt for that awesome summary. That’s totally true. I agree with all those points. And additive manufacturing comes in a couple different ways. Number one, there are the kind of traditional values that additive offers to manufacturing in general, which are speeding the time to market, reducing the time it takes to get prototypes, things like that. The traditional longstanding values additive offers.
But then when you look at, you look at the systems, the actual process column, the process of catching and converting these gases, it’s essentially a big chemistry set. (Similar to a college or high school chemistry set), but it’s a chemistry set that is industrialized into one operation or several operations extremely well. So, as with any sort of chemistry set, you’ve got loss, you’ve got environmental conditions, you’ve got pressure and temperature you have to maintain. It becomes a problem of how do you make the most efficient device or components of devices that allow you to not only component consolidate and make them faster, but also make the device that allows you to make that chemical reaction as efficient as possible.
What that means is you need to tap into geometry and design methodologies that wouldn’t normally be possible with traditional manufacturing. So, additive comes in in a couple of different ways. Number one, is helping speed the time to market; the kind of traditional value. But then there’s this untouched area and the additive market in general for chemical reactions and process engineering that it’s a really sweet spot for additive manufacturing to do things like static gas mixers or chillers or turbo machinery, for instance, turbo machinery is required in various levels or layers of direct air capture, point of source or distributed to take that air and ram it into a system or encourage it into a system at very high efficiency. And additive manufacturing’s already been widely adopted by and supported by the turbo machinery or energy production companies for, almost 20 years already in a production way.
So generally it’s building on top of what aerospace and automotive and energy have already done from a turbo machinery perspective and mechanical reaction perspective. And also it has some elements of semiconductor capital equipment and high-tech components where we take all these different methodologies we’ve learned from different sectors and we apply it to something totally new here. And we’re finding a lot of synergy.
MPF:
Let’s explore this idea of additive in the chemical industry. Can you go into that a little bit more in depth?
Scott:
I think if you take a 30,000-foot view in an additive manufacturing public representation, the effect of the presence of marketing or communication on production, additive manufacturing in the market for the past five to 10 years, it’s been like aerospace, automotive, consumer products. Okay. Well, that is not only boring, but completely crowded. Okay, it’s very crowded, been there, done that.
Now, if you start to look at these other areas of industry, there are all types of really interesting places additive can apply itself. We’ve been doing a huge push in semiconductor capital equipment, for instance, in the last few years, which is generally, no one’s ever associated additive with it, but it’s a huge fit, great fit, in the chemical processing space. Also, I mean, you look at petrochemical refineries, there’s great opportunity there to take process columns. Anything that’s a process column is essentially a tall stack of chemical reactions that occur. And it’s an opportunity, additive’s an opportunity to take these super complex, highly assembled things and consolidate them in space and increase the function and performance of them.
So, there are applications there, not only in fuel refinery, but also again, here we’re talking in the direct air capture space, very similar things, but also hydrogen fuel production. The hydrogen economy’s another thing where you’ve got electrolyzers and other things that can be built extremely efficiently with additive manufacturing.
And again, even just paint processing or chemical processing, drug manufacturing, chicken nugget making, this whole highly specialized process equipment that performs a series of steps that just need to do it as efficiently as possible over and over again, is a place that it’s kind of a blind spot for the additive industry. There’s a couple of trillion dollars worth of chemicals and chemical processing equipment made every year, and it’s a place not really looked at yet, and we’re finding great success there.
MPF:
So, additives’ abilities to reduce assemblies and make geometrically complex parts is driving interest in the chemical space, right?
Scott:
Yeah. And deeply. Also, I have a green streak in me. Not only is my last name Green, but I’m passionate about green causes, and I have been since I was a kid. And I see it as an opportunity, working with Matt to help further somebody’s green causes, but yes, you’re right, that those applications to maybe less green industries can help improve their efficiency.
Now, whether those companies take that extra efficiency and use it to keep being dirty and line their pockets is one question, but it presents the opportunity for other maybe dirtier industries to become even more efficient and pollute less by using additive manufacturing to create more efficient processes with less waste.
MPF:
Can either of you go into a little bit about what kind of parts for the direct air capture are being additively made? I saw that there might be some heat exchangers or some other things. Can you go into that a little bit?
Scott:
Yeah, I’ll take a couple of them and I think I can hand it over to Matt on other opportunities. But again, if you look at all the opportunities for direct air capture, you’ve got to push air, okay. You’ve got to push air in some way super efficiently, and there are a bunch of ways to do that. You could just take a huge fan that moves really slowly. Because again, the game is, you can’t make more carbon than you’re taking out of the air. So you got to have super-efficient, significantly negative operating model. So you’ve got to have efficient, really efficient per gram or pound of fuel air moving, which is again, turbo machinery components. It’s been around, additive has been working in turbo machinery, again for almost two decades. That’s bread and butter, easy stuff that’s easy to go ahead and apply. There are heat exchangers in quite a few places depending on the configuration and heat exchangers, again, very well proven out in the additive spaces, just turning and applying it to another place that needs it.
And then you start getting into some of the more exotic and interesting stuff. Like, okay, if you’re just looking at, I need to push air and I need to kill heat, okay, that’s easy. Then you’ve got stuff like direct air contactors. You’ve got process equipment that are chillers or burners, steam generators, boilers, things like that are all really good targets for us. And then again, in process chambers too, you’ve got potentially a couple different things happening. You might have in a traditionally manufactured lattice like Mellapak or something like that, and maybe a solvent spring process to help get carbon off of the traditional lattice. Well, that can be converted into really efficient lattice. Everyone knows that lattice is really something that additive enables. And this is a great example of where lattice can be useful with additive. You got to make essentially big mechanical filters and that’s what lattice and carbon capture are really all about.
And then with the ability to engineer highly efficient solvent spraying systems, that really allows us to even improve the clean out of the direct air capture cells or contactors by just better, spraying pressure washing off the carbon instead of letting a drip process carry it away.
MPF:
Are the materials dominantly metal or plastic or both?
Scott:
Yeah, so far we’ve seen a lot of metal, aluminum and stainless steel or other steels. I think there’s absolutely an opportunity for plastic, chemical resistant or high-temperature plastics out there in the market for sure.
MPF:
Okay. Matt, did you want to add anything about the kind of components that direct air capture benefits using additive manufacturing?
Matt:
Well, I think additive manufacturing, as Scott said, enables for very rapid prototyping and testing for different types of arrangements and surfaces and things that help to advance the technology much more quickly and at a lower cost. In our applications, we’re really kind of focusing in on areas where we see additive manufacturing having unique ability to enable us to integrate our technologies with our customers and industrial needs in highly efficient ways, building high-accuracy systems that can provide more value to our customers.
MPF:
This question is for either of you, do you think or is there anything that additive manufacturing technologies needs to develop or advance in, in order to continue what you’re doing and even make this process more efficient and better?
Scott:
Yeah, I can take that. I think there’s definitely, right now, if you look at the metal additive manufacturing space, laser powder bed fusion is really quite a mature technology. It’s been around for quite a while. And if you look at the state of the machines, the technology tends to settle and there are usually in the beginning, lots of different changes while it’s trying to be mature. And then when it becomes mature, there’s more focus changes like material and speed and productivity per dollar.
So, I think that those are the traditional things that you’re going to see in the metal additive space now, which are number one, material opportunity, now that the machine, the recipe for making an LPBF part is pretty firmed up. Now, there’s a significant effort and explosion of new materials, I think in the last five or six years or so in LPBF.
But in order to really scale, something that we at 3D Systems do is we take a look at a market or an industry and we take a look at the really highly valuable applications where we know additive is a good fit. Then we start chipping away at the barriers for scale and adoption. So, okay, we know that for instance, a couple of components are an excellent fit for additive manufacturing and direct air capture. Now, what can we do as a company to make us the most efficient process to support that demand?
So, to answer your question I’d say, productivity per dollar, a total part, productivity, how can I make the cost of components cheaper and make significantly more of them than I could with just five years ago with a single laser danced over some powder? How can I make extremely complex, long scan time parts, lots of drawing, go much faster so I can produce parts in great volumes at a reasonable cost? And that’s definitely one of the major contributors to, going to be one of the major contributors to scale and adoption, and that’s something we’re focused heavily on.
It’s an economic formula really right now. Everything’s there that we need. It’s a matter of, okay, how can we do this after we’ve proven it as fast and as huge as possible?
MPF:
Matt, any comments from you? What would you like to see in additive?
Matt:
Well, I’m certainly not an expert in additive manufacturing, but I think that the ability to make parts with mixed alloys, different alloys that have high complexity, and also eventually looking at larger production envelopes is something that I think will help the technology framework scale over time.
Scott:
Yeah, I could definitely agree with that. Multi-material metal printing where you’ve got basically 90% one material and 10% another is super interesting because it allows you to reduce plating processes, coating processes, things like that, absolutely. And then larger bed frames more quick and dirty. Again, like high productivity, large bed frame results are definitely needed.
MPF:
I remember there was a technology that could handle multi-materials in additive years ago, but that was more in the plastics field than in the metals.
Scott:
Yeah. Yeah, I see less of that real true application and production application. Production applications less real true opportunity there, except for medical diagnostic modeling and things like that. It’s real clear, but the materials for prototyping and diagnostic modeling are definitely there. But for metals, very sparse actual participation from the industry in developing something truly useful and scalable.
MPF:
Okay. Do you guys have any final thoughts you wish to add?
Scott:
No, I don’t. Thank you so much.
MPF:
Well, thank you both so much. I appreciate your time.
Scott:
Yeah, absolutely.
Matt:
Yeah. Thank you so much, Leslie. Pleasure to chat with you.
