Our first paper on sustainable steelmaking published in PNAS!

The group's first paper on sustainable #steelmaking was published today in PNAS with Xueli (Sherry) Zheng, Subhechchha Paul, Lauren Moghimi, and Yifan Wang and our excellent collaborators! Our paper provides the first view of how the nanoscale particles present in all #ironmaking reactors give rise to sticking effects known to degrade the Carbon-free version of iron ore reduction.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.2305097120

Reducing iron ores to iron generates ~4% of the global CO2 footprint across all industries -- making it just over half the emissions of the steelmaking industry. Hydrogen could decarbonize ironmaking, but its reactors struggle with scalability.

In this study, we use in-situ X-ray diffraction and ex-situ X-ray ptychographic tomography to directly image how the kinetics of this reaction are inexplicably altered by whiskering effects that are "turned on" between 300-400C.