Chemist James Tour is a nanoscientist who thinks big, and he’s set his sights on some of society’s toughest challenges.
“It provides an avenue for really helping out the environment,” Tour said of flash Joule heating, a process his group invented five years ago that uses a jolt of electricity to instantaneously transform materials. His research has shown the heating method can turn all manner of refuse — including plastic bottles, food waste, old tires and mixed plastic — into a valuable carbon nanomaterial called graphene.
Graphene consists of atom-thick sheets of carbon that are chemical cousins of buckyballs. Though Tour’s wide-ranging research has been cited more than 140,000 times, he is best known for his work with carbon nanomaterials like graphene, as evidenced by the National Academy of Engineering’s citation of the work in its announcement of his election as a member in 2024.
While Tour’s initial interest in flash Joule heating centered on graphene, it is not what excites him most today.
“This opens up the whole rest of the Periodic Table,” said Tour, a synthetic organic chemist. “You've got 100 or so elements, and carbon is one of them. Say you want to do something with all of the transition metals, or you want to make new metal carbides for strengthening or enhancing other materials. You can do it now.”
Tour’s research has also shown flash heating can destroy harmful pollutants like forever chemicals and even vaporize metals, which can be vented away for separation, storage and disposal. For example, his team showed it could simultaneously remove toxic heavy metals like chromium, cadmium and lead from electronic waste while also recovering valuable metals like rhodium, palladium and gold.
Changing the economics of metal recovery could reduce the need for costly, carbon-intensive mining and refining of metals from ore. And it doesn’t end there, Tour said, citing a study where his team transformed ground up bits of industrial turbines into silicon carbide.
“We can use that silicon carbide as battery anodes,” he said. “We can use it in mundane things like sandpaper, or we can use it in the electronics industry. It gives you a whole circularity in the supply chain. When you’re done with something, you just resurrect it as a new material.”
By virtue of their nanoscale properties, those materials could then be added to other materials to improve their performance and lower their carbon footprints, Tour said.
“The making of concrete and cement account for 8% of all human CO2 emissions,” he said. “If you can add a nanomaterial to concrete, that allows you to use 20-30% less concrete. That is a big savings in terms of CO2 emissions.”
To solve societal-scale problems, innovative technology must be translated from a laboratory demonstration into an industrial product. That requires hefty capital investment and years of further testing. While Tour has licensed technologies to large companies in the past, he said he typically starts his own companies now because that provides more opportunities to secure the necessary capital to bring the technology to market.
“You can’t just license the patents and walk away,” he said. “You’ve got to nurture these things.”