Abstract
Carbon dioxide (CO(2)), a main composition of flue gas, represents a significant and largely untapped carbon resource. Herein, mediated by glycine (Gly), we captured and converted CO(2) into CaCO(3) nanoparticles using a real flue gas from a power plant, first time demonstrating the feasibility of using amino acid to convert CO(2) from power plant flue gasses. The method did not require extraneous energy and CaCO(3) nanoparticles with a size of ~25 nm were obtained. Moreover, the potential toxicity of CO(2)-converted nanoparticles was investigated. It appeared that both the initial CO(2) loading and the carbamate percentage significantly influence the shape and size of the CaCO(3) particles. Our method was also proved effective for flue gas with varying CO(2) concentrations (4%, 12%, and 20%). By tuning flue gas bubbling time and flow rate to achieve consistent CO(2) loading and carbamate levels, we produced CaCO(3) nanoparticles with similar shapes and sizes across all CO(2) concentrations studied. In addition, our data indicated that although real flue gas contains small amounts of gases like oxygen and CO, they insignificantly influence the shape and size of our nanoparticles but did impact the phase component of CaCO(3). The toxicity experiments found that CaCO(3) nanoparticles produced from both real flue gas and simulated flue gas exhibited concentration- and time-dependent effects on cell viability.