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Producing Sustainable Ceramics

Watch this video to take a peek inside the lab of Reeja Jayan, at which a team is developing sustainable methods to synthesize, process, and manufacture ceramic materials.

Topics:
Ceramics Materials

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    Transcript

    00:00:08 So my lab here at CMU, J-Lab, we are developing  sustainable methods to synthesize, process,   and manufacture ceramic materials. These ceramics  are found to have applications in everything from   electronics, aviation, transportation, the energy  industry, very broadly. And a big challenge is   that the process of making ceramics requires a lot  of energy. And because of that, it is also a very   polluting process. And as we start electrifying  various applications in our daily lives,   from our devices to our cars, we will need a lot  more ceramics and we will need to find sustainable   routes to make them. And the way we do that is by  this process intensification. To give an example,   if you want to heat water at home, you would  take water in a vessel and then you would heat   it. The container gets hot and then the water  gets hot. And it takes time, right, minutes,   tens of minutes. Now, if you take a cup of water,  put it in the microwave, it can be heated up in  

    00:01:33 seconds. And that's because the water heats up,  not the cup. It's the same thing we want to apply   to the process of making ceramics. Instead of  cooking these materials at 2000 degrees Celsius   for 20 hours, can we apply energy in a burst,  in this case using electromagnetic radiation,   one example is microwaves, and complete the  entire process in seconds, in some cases.   We have a calculation where for every hour that  these materials cook in our furnaces in the lab,   which use microwaves, the material has to  cook for 50 hours in a conventional reactor.   That is where we primarily save on energy.  And by extension, if you do a calculation,   there is a significant savings on emissions  released. If you are able to think carefully   and deploy resources we have around us, we can  extract energy very elegantly from what's around   us. And my group is trying to leverage these  interactions and the tremendous amount of energy  

    00:02:44 that they release very quickly to make materials  in a sustainable fashion. And this application to   ceramic is one example, but there are many other  examples where we need to rethink the way we make   materials. It becomes absolutely critical to  think carefully about both the science and the   policy associated with decarbonizing industry and  industrial production of materials and chemicals.