Three professors at Texas A&M University’s biological and agricultural engineering department have come up with a novel way to feed plants in urban greenhouse farms – use free, reclaimed CO2 and water from the exhaust of cars.
In a paper entitled ‘Capture of CO2 and water while driving for use in the food and agricultural systems’ by Maria Barrufet, Elena Castell-Perez and Rosana Moreira, and published in Circular Economy and Sustainability, the researchers outlined how a device would fit into a car and basically bottle the gases.
Heat from the engine could power an organic Rankine cycle (ORC) system, essentially a small, closed unit containing a turbine, heat exchangers, condenser, and feed pump that works like an old-fashioned steam engine but on a much smaller scale, and with far less heat needed to produce electricity.
The ORC would power the other components, such as a heat-exchange system, that could cool, compress, and change the CO2 gas to a liquid for more compact storage.
“Years ago, we didn’t think we could have air conditioning in a car,” Barrufet says. “This is a similar concept to the air conditioning that we now have. In a simple way, it’s like that device, it will fit in tight spaces.”
So far in preliminary tests the results look positive.
