Three-layered nanocomposite tackles carbon capture’s biggest challenges

December 17, 2025
By Sarah C.P. Williams

Carbon capture technology could be crucial for fighting climate change by removing carbon dioxide from powerplant emissions. But today’s materials that aim to do this often struggle to maintain their performance in real-world conditions. Now, researchers at UC Berkeley, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Stanford University have designed a three-layered nanocomposite that manages to maintain a high capture capacity even when exposed to humidity, acids, and other harsh conditions that typically degrade such materials.

“To make carbon capture economically viable, we need materials that can withstand the harsh realities of industrial environments while maintaining high performance. This work demonstrates a fundamentally new approach for designing the next generation of capture materials,” said Jeffrey Reimer, professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering and a senior corresponding author of the new research, published in Nature Communications on November 26.

Other authors of the paper included Jeffrey Urban and Sizhuo Yang of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Yi Cui and Haiyan Mao of Stanford University.

The underlying design principles used to create the new nanocomposite—a metal-organic framework shielded by two protective shells—could also be used to create new materials for battery storage and nuclear waste absorption, added co-first author Haiyan Mao, who is completing a joint post-doctoral fellow with Cui’s group at Stanford and Reimer’s group at UCBerkeley.

Design strategy and synthesis of core-shell-shell nanocomposites

Shielding water

For more than a decade, scientists have tried to develop new materials to capture carbon dioxide, (CO₂) with the ultimate goal of mitigating climate change. But many of these materials fall short in real-world applications, often because of water interference. Power plant emissions contain significant humidity, and water molecules compete with carbon dioxide for binding sites in most capture materials. Water and acidity can also degrade materials quickly.

Two of the most promising classes of materials use metal organic frameworks (MOFs) or covalent organic frameworks (COFs). But each has their pros and cons. MOFs have high surface areas and strong CO₂ binding through their metal centers, but often degrade in the presence of water. COFs, in contrast, exhibit exceptional chemical stability in harsh environments thanks to their robust covalent bonds, but typically achieve lower CO₂ capture capacities.

“Metal-organic frameworks and covalent organic frameworks each have their individual advantages and disadvantages,” said Mao. “What we do is combine these two materials together using covalent bonds through click chemistry to enhance their advantages and avoid their disadvantages.“

The new design consists of three layers: an internal MOF-808 core that adsorbs CO₂ while staying shielded from water, a polyethylenimine (PEI) bridge that both connects inner and outer layers and offers its own CO₂ binding, and an outer COF shell that reduces water adsorption (compared to MOF-808 alone) by 65%.

An answer for industry

Tests of the new nanocomposite showed that it can achieve a CO₂ uptake of 3.4 millimoles per gram at atmospheric pressure and, even under high humidity conditions, maintains itsadsorption capacity over 100 cycles of capture and release (unprotected MOF materials lost 20% of their capture capacity in similar tests). At lower pressures typical of natural gas flues, incinerators, and steel or cement plants, it adsorbs 1.07 millimoles CO₂ per gram, an 18-fold increase over the unprotected MOF core. After one week in highly acidic or strongly basic solutions, the nanocomposites retained 99% of their mass, compared to losses of 13-28% for unprotected MOFs.

“We were very pleased with these results,” said Mao. “The performance was comparable to current MOFs but the stability in different environments was far better.”

Mao and Reimer think the new material is ideal for scaling up for industrial applications—the MOF core that they used it already known for its easy and scalable synthesis and requires relatively low energy consumption to produce. This means the nanocomposite could help bringdown the cost of carbon capture technologies—currently a barrier to their wider use.

The new work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy and the PrISMa/USorb Project.