Efficient Adsorption-Based Direct Air Capture Via Triply Periodic Minimal Surface Architectures

Direct air capture (DAC) of CO₂ is a critical technology for climate change mitigation, yet its large-scale deployment remains constrained by high energy demand and low process efficiency. In adsorbent-based DAC systems, conventional contactor structures suffer from a fundamental trade-off between adsorbent capacity and mass transfer kinetics, and the structure-function relationship in CO₂ capture has not been adequately elucidated. Here we demonstrate that this limitation can be overcome through the design of architected contactors enabled by the precision fabrication of topologies via additive manufacturing. Using 3D-printed triply periodic minimal surface (TPMS) structures as active hydrodynamic substrates for DAC, we achieve a 70%-75% increase in the fraction of fast adsorption sites and a 114% enhancement in CO₂ productivity compared with a conventional square-channel monolith. The TPMS architecture induces vigorous chaotic advection and stable vortices that significantly thin the mass-transfer boundary layer, alleviating the capacity-kinetics trade-off, while simultaneously reducing energy consumption by 51.8%. These results suggest that architected flow topology can serve as a transferable design principle for improving DAC contactor efficiency.