スキップしてメイン コンテンツに移動

Materials to Support the Space Elevator Construction Concept

 In the anime "Mobile Suit Gundam 00 (Double O)", which I watched when I was a student, there was a space solar power generation system* with towers jutting out from the earth into space, and when I saw it, I thought, "Wow, it must be very efficient to generate solar power in the vastness of space. But I soon forgot about it, and the time went by.

*) In the setting of the anime, in 2307 A.D., humanity had commercialized a space solar power generation system and an orbital elevator as an alternative energy source to depleted fossil fuels (Wikipedia).

 Today, more than 10 years have passed, and I remembered the above when Obayashi Corporation's "Space Elevator Construction Concept" came up in a magazine I saw without thinking. 宇宙エレベーター建設構想｜季刊大林 (obayashi.co.jp) I was shocked to see that what was only an ideal in an anime is now being considered as a real corporate vision (in 2050 A.D.).

 In the magazine, the idea was raised from a dream to a reality by the use of "Carbon nanotubes," a light and strong material, which suddenly seemed like a familiar material to me as an engineer in a chemical factory (although we do not product carbon nanotubes yet). What I can contribute is very small, but I wanted to help make this concept.

 Introduction to the production process of carbon nanofibers.カーボンナノチューブの生成法 - 遠藤研究室 (shinshu-u.ac.jp)

コメント

コメントを投稿

このブログの人気の投稿

The production process of sake

 I heard that another company was making acrylamide, a chemical product , using bacteria to synthesize it (no byproducts), so out of curiosity, I went to see the production process of sake, which is made using bacteria. C 6 H 12 O 6 　　→　　                2C 2 H 5 OH　　+　　2CO 2 ↑ (glucose)　　bacteria                (ethanol) 1. Rice malt is grown on steamed rice to encourage  aspergillus  growth. 2.  Rice malt,  Yeast, steamed rice, and water are added to the tank in several times and maintained at low temperature (unrefined). ※ The quality of the water is most important. 3) Squeeze out the  unrefined , let the liquid stand, and filter out the supernatant liquid.
コメントを投稿
続きを読む

CO2 Reduction

  I will transcribe this from a chemical engineering journal*1) for my own understanding. 　Let's consider the reaction of a plant that reduces CO2 to oxygen. First, a water molecule is "photo-oxidized" to produce one mole of oxygen molecules, and at the same time, two moles of "hydride" (H-) are produced, and these two moles of "hydride" reduce CO2. In short, the equation for the photo-oxidation of water is ② from ①. H- = H+ + 2e-   ① 2H2O+4hν → O2+4e- + 4H+ → O2+2H- + 2H+   ② The "conversion of photons (hν) to electron energy (e-)" in equation ① above is achieved by the catalytic function of chlorophyll in plants. Artificially, it is done by photocatalysts. The author of this article has succeeded in "CO2 reduction to methanol" *2). The principle is the reduction of CO2 by 3 moles of "hydride" ③. 3H- + CO2 + 3H+ → CH3-OH (methanol) + H2O   ③ *1)Production Engineering Journal, Chemical Equipment, April 2021, p63 *2)Y. Mats...
コメントを投稿
続きを読む

Photochemical industry production

 This is an excerpt from the following book*1) as a memo of what I found interesting. Oxidation and reduction can proceed simultaneously in the same reaction field (on a photocatalyst), a characteristic unique to photocatalytic reactions that cannot be realized in other reaction systems.  When L-lysine, a kind of essential amino acid, is used as a raw material for photocatalytic reactions in aqueous solution in an oxygen-free atmosphere, pipecolic acid is generated. The photocatalytic synthesis of pipecolinic acid is the only synthetic pathway known to date that does not require any special reagents and does not produce any byproducts because the reaction involves redox reactions with excited electrons and holes.   The only photochemical reaction currently used for industrial production is probably the PNC method of ε-caprolactam synthesis by photo-nitrosation, developed by Toray Industries, Inc. ε-caprolactam is the raw material for 6-nylon, which is probably synthe...
コメントを投稿
続きを読む