The role of solvent in ionic liquid based energy harvesting devices from CO2 capture

In the last few years a strong belief in the need of actions against climate change has spread across all national and international organizations, as confirmed by the Paris Agreement signing in 2016. In the aforementioned treaty it was stated that in order to avoid socio-economic disasters related to extreme natural events, it is crucial to keep the global average temperature well below the limit of 2 °C above the pre-industrial levels. It has been esteemed that, in order to have a good chance of limiting the global warming, we have to roughly halve the net CO2 emission before 2030 with respect to the one measured during the 2020. With this aim, much attention has been given to the development of technologies that could limit the release of CO2 in the atmosphere. Among those, CO2 capture by means of ionic liquids has been recently investigated as possible solution. This thesis focuses on an evolution of such technology: a device able to harvest energy while capturing CO2. The device is based on the structure of an ionic liquid based supercapacitor. Experiments have shown that fluxing CO2 in the device induces an increase in the potential difference between electrodes originated by the reaction between the ionic liquid and CO2. Moreover, it has been observed that the dilution of the ionic liquid with a solvent enhances the overall performances of the device. In this work I focus on a classical molecular dynamics study of the system, to shed light on the reasons which lead to a performances improvement. In particular, the study shows that dilution has the effect of reducing the device resistance while conserving a comparable potential difference induced by the capture, resulting in an overall increase of the amount of harvested energy.