Engineers at aerospace company Alliant Techsystems (ATK) saw an opportunity in a condensation problem they were having while testing components in a supersonic wind tunnel: They realized that carbon dioxide in combustion gases would freeze if it was compressed sufficiently and accelerated to three times the speed of sound. The company is now wrapping up a three-year project funded with a $2.7 million grant from the Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy. A supersonic inertial CO2 extraction system from ATK is one of 15 technologies that have been advanced by ARPA–E for their potential to remove CO2 from the exhaust of coal-fired power plants.
The goal of ARPA–E’s $40 million, three-year Innovative Materials and Processes for Advanced Carbon Capture Technologies (IMPACCT) program is to dramatically reduce the cost of extracting CO2 from flue gases so it can be sequestered from the atmosphere. All carbon capture technologies...
