Seoul National University’s College of Engineering (Dean Byoungho Lee) announced on October 27 (Wednesday) that the research team led by Professor Youngsub Lim of the Department of Naval Architecture and Ocean Engineering developed a design method to increase the electrochemical carbon dioxide conversion efficiency by improving mass transfer in the reactor through their joint research with the research team of Dr. Ung Lee and Dr. Hyung Suk Oh of the Korea Institute of Science and Technology.

Carbon dioxide, which is released from the burning fossil fuels, is the primary cause of climate change, and technology to store or convert it is needed to solve the recently intensifying problem of global warming. The electrochemical reduction of carbon dioxide has the advantage of reducing carbon dioxide as well as the producing of synthetic gases that can be used as fuel, but most of the existing research are at the level of basic research, such as catalyst development, lacking any reactor design technology required for its commercialization.
 
In response, the SNU-KIST joint research team determined that external factors such as the flow of fluid within the reactor can have a dominant influence on the improvement of the reaction performance, and thus, designed a structure that can make the fluid flow constant and uniform through the computational fluid dynamics model, experimentally verifying this, and based on this, a systematic reactor design guideline was presented.
 
The carbon dioxide electrochemical reduction reactor design guidelines proposed in this study are expected to contribute to the commercialization of large-scale electrochemical carbon dioxide conversion technology in the future.
 
With the support of the National Research Foundation of Korea's 'Carbon to X Technology Development Project for the Production of Useful Materials', this study was conducted jointly by PhD Candidate ByungChan Jung and Professor Youngsub Lim of Seoul National University, Dr. Hyung Suk Oh and Dr. Ung Lee of the Korea Institute of Science and Technology
 
The paper 'Design methodology for mass transfer-enhanced large-scale electrochemical reactor for CO reduction', containing the research results, is scheduled to be published in the international scientific journal 'Chemical Engineering Journal' (JCR engineering, top 2.5% in the chemical field) in November, and has currently been published online.