Limiting anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions constitutes a major issue faced by scientists today. Herein we report an efficient way of controlled capture and release of carbon dioxide using nature inspired, cheap, abundant and non-toxic, industrial pigment namely, quinacridone. An electrochemically reduced electrode consisting of a quinacridone thin film (ca. 100 nm thick) on an ITO support forms a quinacridone carbonate salt. The captured CO2 can be released by electrochemical oxidation. The amount of captured CO2 was quantified by FT-IR. The uptake value for electrochemical release process was 4.61 mmol g(-1). This value is among the highest reported uptake efficiencies for electrochemical CO2 capture. For comparison, the state-of-the-art aqueous amine industrial capture process has an uptake efficiency of ca. 8 mmol g(-1).
Keywords: carbon dioxide capture; electrochemistry; organic pigments; vat dyes.
© 2014 The Authors. Published by Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.