THE FUTURE OF
MACHINE (HUMAN) IS HERE
MEMORY
REVOLUTION IN PRODUCTION
The idea of assembly line was created by Henry Ford in the early 1910s, triggering a huge rise in human productivity. The human-machine cooperation in manufacturing became the icon of modernized factories.
The pursue of maximum productivity has become the race between human labor and machine production in the 21st century----a race that would eventually lead to the post-work society.
VISION
BIRTH OF GOOD MACHINES
Since industrialization, the idea of optimization has been embedded in machine design for production rate and quality as high as possible, which is the optimization of results. A good machine is the AirCO cyborg, which is constantly negotiating with itself, contesting its own birth and creation, eating up its footprint along the process of its completion and is a machine without results.
WHAT DOES THE GOOD MACHINE DO?
CRYSTALLIZATION AND POST-PROCESSING
THE FUZZY SCIENCE
Existing carbon capture and storage technology can only slow down the carbon emissions of large point sources but cannot treat the already accumulated CO2 in the environment. Crystallization provides a simple strategy to capture CO2 directly from ambient air. The reactive process forms insoluble crystals that trap CO2 in a carbonate form in a dense hydrogen bonding network. The process is reversible by heating the crystals to recycle the solution and CO2 for other uses.
The recycled CO2 from the crystallization process can be reutilized in power production, concrete production, and urban farm greenhouses that use CO2 to facilitate photosynthesis reactions in plants. The recycled guanidine compound can be turned into solutions for future crystallization processes.
With the help of the report “Opportunities and Limits of CO2 Recycling in a Circular Carbon Economy” contributed by Amar Bhardwaj, Dr. Colin Mccormick, and Dr. Friedmann from Columbia, we are able to identify the current cost of products through CO2 recycling pathways.
The report also presented the carbon abatement potential of all the pathways. The study is based on a life cycle assessment to find the net decrease in emissions that would result from completely replacing conventional production pathways with CO2 recycling pathways.
