Recipient Organization
NITRICITY INC.
6 COMSTOCK CIR APT 418B
STANFORD,CA 943057717
Performing Department
(N/A)
Non Technical Summary
Nitrogen fertilizer is vital to crop growth and for feeding our growing population. Today, the global supply of nitrogen fertilizer is reliant on coal and natural gas, and it travels through a complex and hazardous supply chain to farms around the world. As a result, fertilizer costs are inflated, greenhouse gas emissions are enormous (gigaton scale), and farmers are often forced to make decisions based on prices rather than plants, resulting in poor nitrogen management and poor nitrogen use efficiency. Unused nitrogen can lead to increased smog from NOx fieldemissions and nitrate runoff which pollutes rivers and streams. Furthermore, entrenched supply chains often miss developing economies, so nitrogen is not available where it is needed most, increasing hunger and causing deforestation to satisfy the need formore, low-yield farmland. Nitricity is developing a carbon-free, plasma-based system to produce nitrogen fertilizer, on farms at the point of use, using air, water, and renewable electricity. Removing the long supply chain allows farmers to apply fertilizers when their fields are ready, reducing wasteful fertilizer runoff and maximizing nitrogen delivery to crops anywhere in the world. Theresearch in this project focuses directly on the development of an essential component of this technology, a low-cost plasma arc reactor that can couple directly to solar energy and converts nitrogen from the air to form nitrogen fertilizer. This research will improve the energy efficiency of the plasma reactor which will decrease the overall cost of a system required to provide sustainable nitrogen fertilizer to a farm. The approach to achieve this is to first evaluate specific reactor inputs to better understand the mechanisms that promote energy efficiency, and then to optimize a reactor architecture based on the mechanisms learned, vetting its performance and stability. The successful development and implementation of thisreactor in a modular, distributablesystem will allow farms to effectivelyfertilize themselves with increased nitrogen management and pH control,save farmers ($/acre), promote global food security with greater access to nitrogen fertilizer in developing regions, decrease smog and deforestation,and mitigate up to 80% of greenhouse gas emissions versus the incumbent production, distribution, and application of nitrogen fertilizer.
Animal Health Component
40%
Research Effort Categories
Basic
30%
Applied
40%
Developmental
30%
Goals / Objectives
The major goalof this project istheresearch and development of a low-cost, energy efficientgliding arc reactor for nitrogen oxidegeneration. This is a vital step inthe sustainable production of nitric acid and nitrogen fertilizers. We describe two broad research arcs toward this goal:(1) to understand the mechanisms that promote energy efficiency by testing target system variables, (2) to optimize a reactor architecture based on the mechanisms learned, vetting its performance and stability. In line with these arcs, the key quantifiable and/or measurable objectives for this projectare: (1) Build a test platform that allows forevaluation ofplasma performance and NOx generation efficiency. (2) Achieve a NOx production efficiency requiringless than 45 kWh/lb N for 1 hour. (3)Achieve a NOx production efficiency requiringless than 35 kWh/lb N for 1 hour. (4) Demonstrate control over NO2:NO production ratio with system inputs. (5)Achieve a NOx production efficiency requiringless than 35 kWh/lb N for over 1 week (8hr/day). (6) Determine causesof failure and/or performance loss using accelerated degradation testing methods.
Project Methods
The project will be conducted with a combination of experimental evaluation and scientific modeling to reach the key goal of improved energy efficiency. We describe a set of variables, known tohave an impact on the energy efficiency of nitrogen fixation witha gliding arc plasma. We will evaluate these parameters, guided by our preliminary results and previous literature results to build trends and a model of the variables effect on fixation efficiency. We use in-line detection to quantify our products and feed a machine learning model which will begin to predict which conditions will perform best. Using sequential learning we expect to accelerate our ability optimize our gliding arc reactor, and be able to achieve excellent efficiencies with relatively few experiments. This will be followed by implementing an additional set of conditions, unique to our modular, on-farm fixation design (solar input, gas handling, product selectivity),providing both an understanding of how to fix nitrogen efficiently, and how to do so in our envisioned sustainable application. Efforts: We will be explaining/teaching our results, in simplifiedforms, to members of our target audiencevia the described project products (demos, videos, systems, figures). With the desired outcome of a low cost, efficientreactor module, we will have aconvincing economic case to convert farms away from unsustainable, fossil-fuel derived nitrogen fertilizer, and toward the use of our sustainably-produced fertilizer, causinga change in actions of our audience. Evaluation: We will evaluate our success initially by the achieved energy efficiency with whichwe can fix nitrogen with our designed reactor, measured in kWh/lb N as well as the stability of this performance (hrs). This efficiency improvement unlocks the other, longer term project outcomes of decreased system cost for the same amount of fixed nitrogen ($), the number of acres to be fertilized (contracts or intent #), increased profits from fertilizer sale ($), and the CO2eq emissions mitigated (lbs or tons). We expect that the longer term outcomes will be more profound and rapidly growing after Phase II of this project, with increasingfarmengagement.