Meet Kyle Diederichsen

Advisor: T. Alan Hatton

Institution: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Bio:  Kyle Diederichsen is an Intelligence Community Postdoctoral Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with Professor T. Alan Hatton in the Department of Chemical Engineering. He earned his bachelor’s degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he spent time working on the self-assembly of block copolymer thin films and earned the Marilyn and Howard L. Anseth Outstanding Undergraduate Research Award. For his doctoral work, Kyle attended the University of California, Berkeley, working with Professor Bryan McCloskey. His dissertation focused on the design and characterization of high transference number polymer – based electrolytes for lithium batteries. As a Postdoctoral Fellow he has focused on electrochemically mediated carbon capture, considering both electrolyte design and system engineering. Kyle has received multiple awards for outstanding teaching during his graduate career and served at various levels of graduate student government. At MIT, Kyle has led the Postdoctoral Association’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee, advocating for improved hiring practices across the Institute, and support and recognition for groups supporting underrepresented populations.  

Abstract:  The continuing release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere has significantly increased the rate of climate change. Given the continued delay in substantial carbon emissions reductions, carbon capture is increasingly seen as a critical component in reducing the long-term impacts of climate change. Recently, there has been a substantial interest in applying electrochemical regeneration techniques to carbon capture. In these systems, sorbent molecules react with CO2 and then a voltage is applied which modulates the molecule’s affinity for CO2 and causes it to release. By acting directly on the capture agent, system energetics can be reduced because there is no need to heat or apply vacuum to portions of the system which are not active for capture. In addition, by being electrically driven, such systems can be tied very directly to renewable power and scaled to fit different carbon capture scenarios. This could enable visions of highly distributed carbon capture devices. My work has focused on the development of novel devices and processes to enable electrochemically driven carbon capture. Our targeted design involves a modular hollow fiber-based geometry which would enable capture and release in the same location as the electrochemistry, facilitating rapid transport of gas to the active species. To enable this design we have developed liquid, redox-active quinone molecules, demonstrated initially in a flow system. In ongoing work, we are designing efficient gas-liquid contacting electrodes for use with this sorbent system.