Caltech's reactor can convert carbon dioxide into inhalable oxygen
According to foreign media reports, although oxygen is common in the entire universe, most oxygen is not like the oxygen molecules that humans need to inhale. Now, researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) claim to have built a reactor that can convert carbon dioxide into oxygen molecules, which can help people fight climate change on the earth or generate the oxygen needed for space travel.
Oxygen is one of the biggest obstacles to human space exploration. The earth is the only place known to have such a large amount of breathable important gas, but carrying oxygen is expensive and unsustainable. On the International Space Station, staff can breathe easily thanks to electrolysis and spare pressurized storage tanks. Some people talked about turning Mars into a place similar to Earth, but this is a huge task, and today's technology cannot achieve this goal.
As a result, researchers at the California Institute of Technology began looking for another way to produce oxygen. In the end, they created a reactor. The team found that if carbon dioxide were to "hit" the surface of the inert gold foil, the molecules could be split. The team said the reactor works similarly to particle accelerators. The carbon dioxide molecules are first ionized, then accelerated using an electric field, and then hit the surface. The current form of reactor production is quite low-only one to two oxygen molecules per 100 carbon dioxide molecules-but it may be an interesting proof of expanding the concept in the future.
In fact, researchers say that this reaction occurs in nature. The concept began to explain the unexpected discovery of oxygen molecules on comets. After the Rosetta spacecraft detected gas flowing from Comet 67P, it initially believed that oxygen might have been locked in the rocks for billions of years.
But in 2017, the California Institute of Technology team proposed another possible explanation: oxygen is produced by other compounds that impact the comet at high speed. After the comet releases water molecules or carbon dioxide, the solar wind can accelerate them and knock them back into the comet. This in turn can create oxygen molecules and serve as an inspiration for the California Institute of Technology reactor.
In the future, the reactor may be put into operation to produce oxygen for astronauts to the moon, Mars, or other places. Or when used on the earth, it can help fight climate change. Of course, there is still much work to be done to reach that stage.
"Is this the final device? No," said Konstantinos Giapis, the study's first author. "Is it a device that can solve the Mars problem? No. But it is a device that can do some very difficult things. We are doing crazy things with this reactor."
The research was published in the journal Nature Communications.
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