The New Materials that Could Ease Climate Impacts

Though his lab in Skokie, Illinois, is thousands of miles from the deserts of Africa, Timur Islamoglu spends his days thinking about how to find enough water in that arid environment. 

Islamoglu, a lead research scientist at the Materials Discovery Research Institute (MDRI), is working to develop substances with just the right combination of qualities to capture moisture from dry air and turn it into a sustainable source of drinking water. He’s targeting arid regions with relative humidities below 30 percent. “Those are the areas that require these technologies, because climate change is expected to exacerbate droughts and reduce precipitation in these already dry regions, intensifying the need for alternative water sources,” Islamoglu says.  

Sustainability is the primary focus for MDRI, the newest division of UL Research Institutes (ULRI). Launched in 2022, MDRI opened its state-of-the-art laboratory in September 2024, complete with equipment for automating chemical synthesis and data collection for use with machine-learning techniques. The lab’s goal is to tackle the problems of climate change and energy storage with projects aimed at providing safe drinking water, removing excess carbon and finding more efficient ways to create, store and use hydrogen as an alternative and clean fuel source. 

“Everyone in the world deserves safe drinking water,” says Stuart Miller, vice president and executive director of MDRI, and providing cheap access to power has great potential to lift people out of poverty. “The greatest challenge that we have now is, how do we do that and still be good stewards of the planet so that we don’t add any carbon dioxide?” Miller says. Developing better materials can help.

Digital-first materials 

In the 170 years since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, humans have developed all sorts of useful materials to create our modern world. Many of them are petroleum-based. But with carbon from fossil fuels rapidly heating the planet, and a population that could reach 10 billion in the 2050s, humanity needs to move away from petroleum and discover new materials for energy storage and production, Miller says. Finding candidates through trial and error would involve sifting through many combinations of different materials, “and we don’t have the time,” he says. “We don’t have 170 years.” 

So MDRI is taking what its leaders call a digital-first approach. That means combining the expertise of materials scientists and chemists with automated equipment for synthesizing chemicals; a nanoprinter for uniting the generation, combination and deposition of nanoparticle catalysts in one automated process for renewable-energy applications; and sensors that collect a wide range of data, including the humidity in a given lab on a given day. All that is fed into machine-learning models that can accelerate the discovery process.

To supply arid regions with water, Islamoglu is working on porous materials that can draw moisture out of low-humidity air much as a sponge would. The approach is material-agnostic, so the MDRI team is looking for an inexpensive candidate to capture water from the air. The trick lies in finding the right balance of various characteristics: for example, in low-humidity conditions the pores have to be small enough to capture the water molecules and concentrate them so they can condense. The materials can’t be too hydrophobic—water-repellent—or they won’t collect the moisture. But they can’t hold the water too tightly, either, or they’d require high temperatures (200 to 300 degrees Celsius) to release it, and generating the energy to reach such temperatures would be expensive. 

Because different climates, such as mildly or highly humid regions, often require different porous-material specifications to optimize water harvesting from the air, that’s also an active research area at MDRI. Water shortages are a growing problem, even in the U.S. and Europe, where food production consumes large quantities of fresh water and climate change alters rainfall patterns. A recent United Nations report lists several developed countries that could suffer from water scarcity by 2040.  

Water into fuel  

A slightly different version of the same material could capture carbon dioxide either directly from air or industrial sources; then it could be converted into something harmless or used to produce new petrochemicals without extracting more oil from the ground. For carbon capture, the pore size of a material is less important than its chemical composition, which allows it to interact with and trap the carbon dioxide, Islamoglu says.

Another way to combat carbon emissions is to use hydrogen-fed fuel cells to produce energy. One important component of a hydrogen-based system is the electrolyzer, which splits water into hydrogen and oxygen. At MDRI, lead scientist Jeff Wu is working to develop better catalysts that make the splitting process more efficient. Existing electrolyzers use rare and expensive precious metals, including platinum and ruthenium. Wu is searching for catalysts that work just as well but are made of cheaper and more abundant metals, such as iron, nickel or copper. 

Beyond that, Wu aims to develop technology to store the hydrogen, perhaps building on Islamoglu’s porous material. He’s also experimenting with using a nanoprinter to accelerate the discovery of Earth-abundant and sustainable catalysts that help fuel cells convert hydrogen into power more efficiently. That power, in turn, might be stored long term in a flow battery, a large energy-storage system that’s based on liquid solvents and that is generally cheaper and safer than lithium batteries. 

MDRI’s ambitious mission is to develop revolutionary materials that are demonstrably safe and sustainable. In keeping with that, Wu runs tests that exceed those conducted in an academic laboratory, where scientists tend to work with a small model under controlled conditions. “Our focus is going to be to make a real impact,” he says. “We are going to make a fuel-cell prototype, an electrolyzer prototype and a flow-battery prototype up to a kilowatt scale.” Such a prototype would be tested in real-world conditions, including temperature swings, loading swings and variations in humidity. 

Laboratory of the future 

Helping to speed the discovery of such materials is Varinia Bernales, the lead researcher in charge of MDRI’s computational section. She is developing ways to identify desirable materials for colleagues such as Wu and Islamoglu, as well as for her own projects. In one of Bernales’s current projects, for instance, she is seeking a way to selectively separate lanthanides in collaboration with scientists from Northwestern University and the University of Toronto. These metals are widely used in modern technologies, including electronics, LEDs and fuel additives—but the process of extracting them from mine ores can contaminate waterways. 

One of Bernales’s collaborators working on the problem of extracting rare-earth metals from complex mixtures is Alán Aspuru-Guzik, a chemist at the University of Toronto. Figuring out how to do that “will pave the way for more sustainable mining as well as for a more robust supply chain,” Aspuru-Guzik says. 

Bernales is building machine-learning-augmented high-throughput computational screening, streamlining methods that try different potential formulations of molecules without synthesizing them or running them through slower, more complex simulations that don’t use machine learning. “You can train the model to tell you if something is going to have the property that you are looking for at a much lower cost than running the full computations,” she says. 

That, combined with robotic systems to take over much of the work of synthesizing samples, should speed up the whole discovery process, Bernales says. “It’s like the laboratory of the future. We’ll have the experimental component, the computational component and these robotic frameworks that will help us to accelerate the process and give the scientists time to think more about other problems.”

Miller wants MDRI to move quickly toward prototypes that might lead to the commercialization of various products. But he doesn’t expect quick solutions for issues related to sustainability. “This is not a short-term problem. I see this as a generational thing,” he says. “I think we’re the generation to build the infrastructure to really deepen the learning, to provide better solutions. And I think the people that solve the problems, they’re sitting in schools now.” 

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