New End-to-End Design Process Produces Two Low-Cost Materials to Capture Methane

Researchers at the University of Chicago's Center for Advanced Materials for Environmental Solutions (CAMES), led by Professor Laura Gagliardi, have created two new materials for capturing methane using an end-to-end, machine-learning-guided workflow that connects data mining, computational design, synthesis and lab testing in a single process. The work, published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, was carried out with UChicago chemistry professor John Anderson and postdoctoral scholar Jianheng Ling.

The two materials, named UCHI-1 and UCHI-2, are zinc-based metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) — porous compounds that can separate methane from nitrogen gas. The team chose zinc, which is less expensive than the nickel or copper typically used in methane-capture MOFs, and said the resulting materials achieved slightly better methane-nitrogen separation than existing options in the scientific literature, at lower cost.

The researchers focused on methane because, although it is less studied than carbon dioxide, it is a far more potent greenhouse gas — with a climate impact roughly 80 times that of CO2 over a 20-year timescale — even though it persists in the atmosphere for only about a decade compared with CO2's thousands of years. Methane leaks from agriculture, livestock, landfills, coal mining and oil and gas operations also cost industry an estimated $10 billion a year, according to the paper's first author, postdoctoral researcher Andrea Darù.

In the traditional process, Gagliardi's team said, computational groups typically hand off molecular designs as data files that experimental groups may or may not pick up, meaning many promising materials are never synthesized or reach industry. The new workflow trains an AI model on data from academic literature and keeps computational and experimental researchers working together throughout, rather than handing off the work partway. UCHI-1 and UCHI-2 serve as a proof of concept; the team says it aims to design materials that outperform the current state of the art as it refines the process further.