chemistry hacks

615 Articles

They Milk Cows, Don’t They?

October 18, 2021 by 90 Comments

You’ve no doubt heard of the many alternatives to cow’s milk that are available these days. Perhaps you’ve even tried a few of them in your quest to avoid lactose. Some coffeehouses have already moved on from soy milk, offering only oat or almond milk instead of 2% and whole. Their reasoning is that soy milk is a highly processed product that can’t be traced back to a single source, which stands in stark contrast to all those bags of single-origin coffee beans.

These nut-based alternatives kicked off what is known as the milk wars — the dairy industry’s fight against labeling plant-based dairy alternatives as ‘milk’ and so on. Well, now it’s getting even more interesting. A company called Perfect Day is making milk using microorganisms that secrete milk proteins. It may sound kind of gross, but it’s essentially microbial fermentation, which is the normal process by which bread, cheese, yogurt, wine, and beer are made.

To be fair, what Perfect Day and other companies are doing is precision fermentation using genetically engineered microorganisms in a bioreactor, so it’s a bit more involved than what you could probably pull off in the basement. Precision fermentation lies somewhere between two modern extremes — plant-based meat and cultured meat. The latter is actual animal tissue grown from stem cells, and is only available at high-end restaurants for exorbitant prices.

Continue reading “They Milk Cows, Don’t They?” →

Electric Vehicles, The Gasoline Problem, And Synthetic Fuels

October 18, 2021 by 115 Comments

When you’re standing at the gas station filling up your car, watching those digits on the pump flip by can be a sobering experience. Fuel prices, especially the price of gasoline, have always been keenly watched, so it’s hard to imagine a time when gasoline was a low-value waste product. But kerosene, sold mainly for lighting, was once king of the petroleum industry, at least before the automobile came along, to the extent that the gasoline produced while refining kerosene was simply dumped into streams to get rid of it.

The modern mind perhaps shudders at the thought of an environmental crime of that magnitude, and we can’t imagine how anyone would think that was a good solution to the problem. And yet we now face much the same problem, as the increasing electrification of the world’s fleet of motor vehicles pushes down gasoline demand. To understand why this is a problem, we’ll start off by taking a look at how crude oil is formed, and how decreasing demand for gasoline may actually cause problems that we should think about before we get too far down the road.

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Making Coffee With Hydrogen

October 9, 2021 by 17 Comments

Something of a Holy Grail among engineers with an interest in a low-carbon future is the idea of replacing fossil fuel gasses with hydrogen. There are various schemes, but they all suffer from the problem that hydrogen is difficult stuff to store or transport. It’s not easily liquefied, and the tiny size of its molecule means that many containment materials that are fine for methane simply won’t hold on to it.

[Isographer] has an idea: to transport the energy not as hydrogen but as metallic aluminium, and generate hydrogen by reaction with aqueous sodium hydroxide. He’s demonstrated it by generating enough hydrogen to make a cup of coffee, as you can see in the video below the break.

It’s obviously very successful, but how does it stack up from a green perspective? The feedstocks are aluminium and sodium hydroxide, and aside from the hydrogen it produces sodium aluminate. Aluminium is produced by electrolysis of molten bauxite and uses vast amounts of energy to produce, but since it is often most economic to do so using hydroelectric power then it can be a zero-carbon store of energy. Sodium hydroxide is also produced by an electrolytic process, this time using brine as the feedstock, so it also has the potential to be produced with low-carbon electricity. Meanwhile the sodium aluminate solution is a cisutic base, but one that readily degrades to inert aluminium oxide and hydroxide in the environment. So while it can’t be guaranteed that the feedstock he’s using is low-carbon, it’s certainly a possibility.

So given scrap aluminium and an assortment of jars it’s possible to make a cup of hot coffee. It’s pretty obvious that this technology won’t be used in the home in this way, but does that make it useless? It’s not difficult to imagine energy being transported over distances as heavy-but-harmless aluminium metal, and we’re already seeing a different chemistry with the same goal being used to power vehicles.

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Creating Methane From Captured Carbon Dioxide And The Future Of Carbon Capture

October 7, 2021 by 124 Comments

There’s something intrinsically simple about the concept of carbon (CO2) capture: you simply have the CO2 molecules absorbed or adsorbed by something, after which you separate the thus captured CO2 and put it somewhere safe. Unfortunately, in physics and chemistry what seems easy and straightforward tends to be anything but simple, let alone energy efficient. While methods for carbon capture have been around for decades, making it economically viable has always been a struggle.

This is true both for carbon capture and storage/sequestration (CCS) as well as carbon capture and utilization (CCU). Whereas the former seeks to store and ideally permanently remove (sequester) carbon from the atmosphere, the latter captures carbon dioxide for use in e.g. industrial processes.

Recently, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) has announced a breakthrough CCU concept, involving using a new amine-based solvent (2-EEMPA) that is supposed to be not only more efficient than e.g. the previously commonly used MEA, but also compatible with directly creating methane in the same process.

Since methane forms the major component in natural gas, might this be a way for CCU to create a carbon-neutral source of synthetic natural gas (SNG)? Continue reading “Creating Methane From Captured Carbon Dioxide And The Future Of Carbon Capture” →

Regular coffee grounds and lab-grown coffee.

Is Lab-Grown Coffee Worth A Hill Of Beans?

September 28, 2021 by 36 Comments

Historically, coffee has needed two things to grow successfully — a decent altitude and a warm climate. Now, a group of scientists from the VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland have managed to grow coffee in a lab. They started by culturing coffee plant cells, and then planted them in bioreactors full of nutrient-rich growing medium. But they didn’t grow plants. Instead of green beans inside coffee cherries, the result is a whitish powdered biomass that resembles pure caffeine. Then the scientists roasted the powder as you would beans, and report that it smells and tastes just like regular coffee.

There are plenty of problems percolating with the coffee industry that make this an attractive alternative — mostly worker exploitation, unsustainable farming methods, and land rights issues. And the Bean Belt, which stretches from Ethiopia to South America to Southeast Asia is getting too hot. On top of all that, coffee production is driving deforestation in Vietnam and elsewhere, although coffee could help the forests regenerate more quickly.

Coffee purists shouldn’t be dismayed, because variety is still possible using varying cell cultures to dial in the caffeine level and the flavors. We’ll drink to that.

Another thing in the industry that’s a real grind is coffee cupping, but spectroscopy could soon help determine bean quality.

A bee pollinates a flower.

Even Bees Are Abuzz About Caffeine

September 13, 2021 by 33 Comments

Many of us can’t get through the day without at minimum one cup of coffee, or at least, we’d rather not think about trying. No matter how you choose to ingest caffeine, it is an awesome source of energy and focus for legions of hackers and humans. And evidently, the same goes for pollinator bees.

You’ve probably heard that there aren’t enough bees around anymore to pollinate all the crops that need pollinating. That’s old news. One solution was to raise them commercially and then truck them to farmers’ fields where they’re needed. The new problem is that the bees wander off and pollinate wildflowers instead of the fields they’re supposed to be pollinating. But there’s hope for these distracted bees: Scientists at the University of Greenwich have discovered that bees under the influence of caffeine are more likely to stay on track when given a whiff of the flower they’re supposed to be pollinating.

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A homemade seven-segment OLED display

Making OLED Displays In The Home Lab

September 4, 2021 by 13 Comments

Just a general observation: when your project’s BOM includes ytterbium metal, chances are pretty good that it’s something interesting. We’d say that making your own OLED displays at home definitely falls into that category.

Of course, the making of organic light-emitting diodes requires more than just a rare-earth metal, not least of which is the experience in the field that [Jeroen Vleggaar] brings to this project. Having worked on OLEDs at Philips for years, [Jeroen] is well-positioned to tackle the complex process, involving things like physical vapor deposition and the organic chemistry of coordinated quinolones. And that’s not to mention the quantum physics of it all, which is nicely summarized in the first ten minutes or so of the video below. From there it’s all about making a couple of OLED displays using photolithography and the aforementioned PVD to build up a sandwich of Alq3, an electroluminescent organic compound, on a substrate of ITO (indium tin oxide) glass. We especially appreciate the use of a resin 3D printer to create the photoresist masks, as well as the details on the PVD process.

The displays themselves look fantastic — at least for a while. The organic segments begin to oxidize rapidly from pinholes in the material; a cleanroom would fix that, but this was just a demonstration, after all. And as a bonus, the blue-green glow of [Jeroen]’s displays reminds us strongly of the replica Apollo DSKY display that [Ben Krasnow] built a while back. Continue reading “Making OLED Displays In The Home Lab” →