Coal is one of the most important fossil fuel in the industrial revolution, which is a major turning point in human history and almost every aspect of daily life was eventually influenced in some way. Its stored energy benefits in many ways of uses, on the other hand its combustion products affect on and leave carbon footprint to our environment. It is one of the major causes of climate change.
I start to study how energy stored in coal and how the energy released in different scales.
The energy we get from coal today is the energy that plants absorbed from the sun million of years ago. All living plants store solar energy through a process known as photosynthesis. When plants die, this energy is usually released as the plants decay process is interrupted, preventing the release of the stored solar energy. The energy is locked into the coal. It might assume that coal is the by-product of the ancient light, which was fossilized light by plants.That means when we get the energy from coal, we use the stored energy from million years ago.
These two drawing are investigated in micro scale.
They show how energy exists within the coal molecule.
Energy exists in form of the chemical bonds created during its fossilization. For the stored energy within coal to be released, heat is added as the activation energy. An analogy of this is that the stored energy within the coal is like an energy store in a stretched piece of rubber. The activation energy for the stretched rubber is like a blade that severs the strand. The severing of the rubber releases the energy that was stored within it. Heat is the blade that severs the chemical bonds and releases the stored energy. The energy released from the coal is in the form of heat.
This is another experiment about coal properties to explore how the stored energy release to our environment. I burned a piece of real coal size around 1.5 cm cubic. The combustion process took around 10 minutes. When the stored energy release, it produced black carbon soot and smoke to the air. The heat energy moved air and soot up. I used papers to capture it, created these three drawings.
In each drawing, I let coal smoke and soot drew on the paper around three minutes and after that I removed a new one for the next three minutes until a combustion process finished. The energy released different in each state as you can see from the combustion product in the drawings.
This drawing investigates a macro scale of using coal in the history. Coal was an important fuel used in power station to produce electricity. The Battersea Power Station is one of the main used of coal in London. It had an annual coal consumption of over million tones. This kind of coal-fired power station has been closed as a result of carbon emission, which is the main cause of global warming.
These my investigation and experiments frame the question about how can architecture reclaim carbon back regarding to the global warming and how architecture reclaim carbon as a self-generated materials.A carbon track in the building such as in the coal-fired power station is a substrate of self-generated carbon nanotube, which is now developing for a new carbon-capture technology. This drawing shows the possibility of using carbon nanotube to capture carbon from our environment as a self-generated architectural material to create a new building skin.
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