A paper from the School of Underlying Conditions and the School of Continuous Improvement runs a nitrate-to-ammonia cell on farm drainage for a full season and asks how much of its performance belonged to the weather
A season at a subsurface drain outlet finds the water, not the electrode, set most of the cell's efficiency
The School of Underlying Conditions has always preferred to study a process where it actually happens, and its newest paper takes that preference to the outlet of a farm drain. Running with the Drain: One Winter of Nitrate Electroreduction on an Oxide-Derived Copper Cathode at a Subsurface Drain Outlet is by Dr Brynjar Obiora, Senior Research Fellow in the School, and Associate Professor Casimir Beng, Lead of the Adaptive Metrics Lab in the School of Continuous Improvement.
We went out expecting to tune a cell and spent most of the winter learning to read the rain. I would not ask for a drier season next year, and I am not certain I would want one.
— Associate Professor Casimir Beng, Lead, Adaptive Metrics Lab
The work situates electrocatalysis within the full soil-to-sump continuum, bringing field survey practice, continuous process monitoring and isotope-verified chemistry to bear on the conversion of agricultural nitrate into a recoverable resource. Over 126 days the cell’s efficiency moved between 28.6% and 69.1%, and the authors trace most of that movement to the drain’s own chemistry and to the subsoil clay that three winter storms carried into the cell.
The University welcomes the paper as a further sign of what its schools can do when one of them supplies the ground and the other the control loop.
Dr Obiora said the School intended to carry the approach to new sites, and that next time “the pit will be dug before the pump goes in, so that we know whose clay we are about to meet”.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.t3gafl.