Capturing attention

Bu Wang didn't necessarily set out to launch a carbon-capture company that would attract millions of dollars from major climate-focused investment firms.

Back in the pre-pandemic days of 2019, the associate professor of civil and environmental engineering was exploring the prospects of capturing carbon dioxide from coal-fired power plants-a line of research that he found, unfortunately, didn't lead anywhere viable because of economic realities.

Amid that investigation, though, one of Wang's postdoctoral researchers, Raghavendra Ragipani, made a fortuitous discovery. Ragipani, now an assistant professor of chemical engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, was testing how quickly carbon dioxide reacted with coal fly ash-the waste product from coal plants-under various conditions. He found the reaction occurred remarkably faster when the ash had a higher pH (was more basic, or alkaline), a result that hadn't been documented in existing scientific literature.

Read more at engineering.wisc.edu.