HIGH DENSITY ENERGY STORAGE USING SELF-ASSEMBLED MATERIALS

The assignment is related to our methane research for the Self Sufficient studio. The challenge of this exercise is to propose an approach in theoretical design of material at the atomic scale that can maximize the amount of stored of methane in a given volume. The methane molecules are attracted to surfaces, while being repelled from each other. We attempt to simulate the interaction between methane and the Calabi-Yau surface area of a hypothetically ideal “methane-catching” material in a sample volume (scale of a methane molecule: pico meters).

___________INTRO

Porous crystals (Metal-Organic Frameworks) are excellent materials for natural gas storage due to their nanoscopic pores and incredibly high surface area. The script generates hypothetical metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), visualizing the most promising structures. MOFs then can be synthesized and tested in the laboratory conditions.

A Calabi-Yau space is used by physicists to describe parts of nature that are too small to see with naked human eye. It is believed, that matter is composed of atoms, and the distances between the components of the atoms are measured at 0.000000000000001 meters (pico meters). Methane CH4 is comprised of one atom of carbon and four atoms of hydrogen. The diameter of the entire molecule is 398.8 pico meters. In the script we will be attempting to optimize the population of CH4 molecules attracted to the surface while ignoring the molecules free floating in-between.

___________DISCRETIZATION

The geometrical structure of methane molecule is a tetrahedron. Since a tetrahedron can be inscribed into a sphere, we are using later geometry in our optimization. The number of molecules will be counted according to the spheres’ diameter, projected onto the surface.

___________LOGIC

\\find the bounding box of the mesh

\\populate the bounding box with a 3dimensional diagrid of spheres that are their own radius’s distance from their neighbour

\\find which spheres collide with the mesh

\\cull all spheres that do not collide

\\run galapagos in different surface and angle configurations

___________ITERATIONS

Using galapagos we generated different options according to our variables in the solution space.

Having tracked myself for several weekdays I realized that the path I am taking every day is virtually identical, thus I decided to visualize data from the only day of past week which followed a different route, a saturday. While the data set that I was able to extract from iPhone app MyTracks was rather scarce( it did not have any altitude information, readings were taken rather sporadically even at 30-second track pace, it did show quite accurately the essence of the route I followed. The route is not repeating itself, as it reflects my movement on a bike around the central part of Barcelona, with the most time spent nearby Placa Catalunya where I also did some off-bike activities.

Through this self-tracking exercised I have learned several things:

\\ it is worth purchasing apps to collect consistent clean data rather than using free software

\\ frequency of data sample collection must be thoroughly correlated with the means of transportation used the most

\\ the absence of Z-coordinate in the data set takes away from understanding ones movement in a city with great topography like Barcelona

Global climate change is one of the most important issues facing modern society.

Global mean surface air temperatures have increased approximately 0.68C over

the past century resulting in the retreat of glaciers, thawing of permafrost and

sea ice, increase in river discharge and alteration of terrestrial and aquatic

ecosystems in ways that demand both immediate and long-term societal response

(Overpeck et al. 1997; IPCC 2001; Peterson et al. 2002; Romanovsky et al. 2002;

ACIA 2004; Hinzman et al. 2005; Stern Review 2006).

Projections suggest even greater warming resulting from rising greenhouse gas

concentrations over the twenty-first century (IPCC 2001, forthcoming).

Methane (CH4) is the third most important greenhouse gas in the atmosphere after

carbon dioxide (CO2) and water vapour, and it is arguably the most dynamic. During

the last glacial period, the concentration of atmospheric CH4 rose and fell by 50% in

association with rapid climate warming (Brooket al. 2000;Dallenbachet al. 2000). It

has increased by approximately 250% since the pre-industrial era, exceeding the rate

of CO2 increase by 120% (IPCC 2001). Numerous recent works suggest that significant

new sources of atmospheric CH4 are still being identified.

Warm temperatures from 1989 to 1998 led to the thaw of massive ice

wedges that had been stable for thousands of years in northern Alaska, Russian Tundra

and especially Northern Mongolia, thus exposing unprotected permafrost to the atmosphere,

which in turn emits catastrophic amounts of methane.

The focus of this study is to identify and emphasize the undeniable growth

of methane emissions in Mongolia, compared and contrasted with CO2 emissions in the same area.

The sample data has been taken from :

ftp://aftp.cmdl.noaa.gov/data/trace_gases/ch4/flask/surface/ch4_uum_surface-flask_1_ccgg_month.txt

ftp://aftp.cmdl.noaa.gov/data/trace_gases/co2/flask/surface/co2_uum_surface-flask_1_ccgg_month.txt

CO2 vs Methane Emissions in Mongolia between 1992-2012

REFERENCES

Brook, E. J., Harder, S., Severinghaus, J., Steig, E. J. & Sucher, C. M. 2000 On the origin and

timing of rapid changes in atmospheric methane during the last glacial period. Global

Biogeochem. Cycles 14, 559–572. (doi:10.1029/1999GB001182)

Dallenbach, A., Blunier, T., Fluckiger, J. & Stauffer, B. 2000 Changes in the atmospheric CH4

gradient between Greenland and Antarctica during the Last Glacial and the transition to the

Holocene. Geophys. Res. Lett. 27, 1005–1008. (doi:10.1029/1999GL010873)

Overpeck, J. T. et al. 1997 Arctic and environmental change of the last four centuries. Science 278,

1251–1256. (doi:10.1126/science.278.5341.1251)

Peterson, B. J., Holmes, R. M., McClelland, J. W., Vorosmarty, C. J., Lammers, R. B.,

Shiklomanov, A. I. & Rahmstorf, S. 2002 Increasing river discharge to the Arctic Ocean.

Science 298, 2171–2173. (doi:10.1126/science.1077445)