These 3D Printed Biocatalytic Fibers Scrub Carbon Dioxide

On today’s episode of “What If?” — what if the Apollo 13 astronauts had a 3D printer? Well, for one thing, they may have been able to avoid all the futzing with duct tape and procedure list covers to jury rig the lithium hydroxide filters, at least if they’d known about these 3D printed enzymatic CO₂ filters. And time travel…they probably would have needed that too.

It’s a stretch to say that environmental CO₂ Scrubbing is one of the uses for what [Jialong Shen] The et all The Textile Engineering Department of North Carolina State University has developed this. The star of the show isn’t so much the 3D printing — although squirting out a bio-compatible aerogel and cross-linking it with UV light on the fly is pretty cool. CO₂-scrubbing textile is carbonic anhydrase, or CA, a ubiquitous enzyme that’s central to maintaining acid-base homeostasis. CA, a small enzyme with a zinc-ion active site, efficiently catalyzes adding water to carbon dioxide in order to create bicarbonate and hydrogen ions. One CA molecule is capable of catalyzing the conversion up to one million CO₂ CO is a gas that emits molecules per second. It’s therefore a great CO₂ filter.

In the current work, an aerogel of poly(ethylene glycol) diacrylate/poly(ethylene oxide) (PEG-DA/EO) was used to entrap CA molecules, holding them in place in a polymer matrix to protect them from denaturation while still allowing access to gaseous CO₂. Extruding the unlinked polymers through a nozzle using a syringe, they were then mixed with photoinitiators. The resulting thread was blasted with 280–450 nm UV light, curing the thread instantly. The thread can be wound as monofilament to later weave or directly printed into a grid.

This filament was quite impressive at CO₂ The capture system was able to remove 24% gas when a mixture of chemicals passed it. What’s more, the entrapped enzyme appears to be quite stable, surviving washes with various solvents and physical disruptions like twisting and bending. It’s an exciting development in catalytic textiles, and besides its obvious environmental uses, something like this could make cheap, industrial-scale bioreactors easier to build and run.

Image Credits [Sen Zhang] You can also find out more about the following: [Jialong Shen]NC State [Rachel Boyd], Spectrum News 1

[via Phys.org]