| Abstract Scope |
Climate change is expected to cause trillions of dollars of economic damage and upend over a century of progress in food, housing, health, and other factors essential to humane living standards. Unfortunately, unlike with polymers, we know of no pre-existing carbon-negative, biologically produced ceramic alternatives. The unique combination of stiffness, hardness, high-temperature resistance and chemical stability makes ceramics difficult to abandon, however. To meet this challenge, we have devised a brand-new class of "farmable" materials — carbon negative bioceramics devised from monocultured planktonic diatoms; a group of silica-forming algae with mechanically robust, lightweight shells. More specifically, we mass-purified frustules from in-house, semi-continuous cultures and bound them with low-temperature silicate geopolymerization techniques that preserved up to seven levels of structural hierarchy while retaining thermal stability up to at least 800C. Our bioceramics were then structurally and thermally characterized with 3-point bending, thermogravimetric analysis, and electron microscopy. |