Up & Coming Engineer - Meet Nishant Lahari

Student Feature - Up & Coming Engineer

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Meet another young engineer Nishant Lahari

by Harold Clark

Perseverance and creative problem-solving. That’s certainly something Nishant Lahari, a 12th grader at Corning-Painted Post High School knows about, as he has pursued an idea to address climate change that he first had in 8th grade. For it, he was designated as one of America's Top Ten Young Scientists in the 3M Young Scientist Challenge in his freshman year. His continued pursuit of his idea included contacting 60 laboratories before finding one willing to let a high schooler use its equipment to run his experiments, and that one was at Cornell, 70 miles from his home! He also accomplished his research without a professor or a mentor, just a friendly technician who taught him the equipment and made sure he worked safely.

Last March Nishant competed in the Terra Rochester Finger Lakes Science & Engineering Fair, where he won the Grand Prize of promotion to the Regeneron International Science & Engineering Fair (ISEF), the world's largest pre-collegiate science competition. In Atlanta in May at ISEF Nishant won First Place in Chemistry!

Noticing that most people do recycling in their homes as a matter of course, Nishant wondered if that same approach could be used to address climate change. What was needed was something that would allow individuals to capture atmospheric carbon and “recycle” it, particularly in the home, where CO2 concentrations are double of those outdoors. Perhaps, he thought, a small unit containing an absorbing substance that could be taken to a processing facility where the CO2 could be deabsorbed to be used in chemical processing or sequestered in underground formations, and a fresh unit picked up and taken back home. Thus, the idea of Integrative Carbon Reduction Technology (iCART) was born, and Nishant set off to find a suitable material.

It had to be inexpensive and reusable through many cycles, so Nishant decided to explore fabrics and similar materials that he could impregnate with polyethyleneimine, a stable substance that readily absorbs CO2. He began by selecting cotton, silica aerogel, 3M dust sheets, ceramic wool, nylon, polyester, 3M

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Filtrete 1000, 3M Filtrete 1500, the latter two being materials used as filters in heating systems, with the thought that perhaps the absorbing unit could be incorporated in HVAC systems.

One key requirement for the fabric was that it have high surface area, so Nishant first needed to screen the materials using the Brunauer Emmet-Teller (BET) method. It was the liquid nitrogen required by the BET instrument that caused the many laboratories’ reluctance to have a high schooler using their equipment. Ultimately Nishant was able to use the facilities of a laboratory at Cornell where the lab technician was willing to handle the liquid nitrogen for him.

After narrowing down his candidate fabrics to those with the highest surface area, Nishant developed a procedure for coating them with the polyamide, drying them, and then measuring their CO2 absorbance, both in a pure CO2 atmosphere and in ambient air. Cotton proved the best candidate and had the added benefits of being both inexpensive and having a reasonably low carbon footprint in its own production process.

Based on his measurements, Nishant determined that a unit measuring 1 meter on a side and containing 3750 sheets of impregnated cotton, if exchanged weekly, could annually absorb the equivalent amount of carbon dioxide absorbed by 100 trees! In his calculations, Nishant even accounted for the carbon footprint of transportation to the desorption facility and/or a sequestration site, as well as the desorption process itself. Nishant is now working to optimize the arrangement of the sheets inside the unit and has applied for and received a patent!

Nishant’s work has caught the eyes of others. He’s giving at TEDx in Tarrytown on September 15th and one at Nazareth College on September 17th. He’s also in discussion with several companies about licensing!

When he’s not concentrating on his research or schoolwork, Nishant relaxes by playing golf. He learned the game as a youngster by following his father around the course, began to play himself, and eventually realized he was actually pretty good at it. He’s now the captain of his high school varsity team and competes nationally. In fact, the week before ISEF he was in Florida at a golf competition!

So, what are Nishant’s plans for the future? He still has to complete high school, but then it’s definitely off to college, preferably in Boston. He’s very interested in becoming a surgeon, having done an internship last summer at Cornell diagnosing leukemia from bodily fluids and this summer doing pharmaceutical research as part of the Secondary Student Training Program at the University of Iowa. Nishant has a bright future in whatever field he ultimately chooses for a career.

If you want to know more about Nishant’s project you can check out his ISEF Project Board or one of his YouTube videos. q

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