Epiphyte is the first mission to be supported on OpenAir's Carbon Crowd platform. It was developed in 2023 by a small team of OpenAir members located all over the United States The team drew significant inspiration from Thursday, an original prototype developed by a team young engineers at Octavia Carbon In Nairobi, Kenya.
NOTE: This project is still at an early stage. The first build is taking place in August - Sept 2023. As construction advances, the documents, BOM and instructions required for replication will be completed and modified here on our project page. Stay tuned for updates in the coming weeks!
One of the primary goals of the OpenAir Collective Is to develop small-scale open-source Direct Air Capture (DAC) systems that can be built by individuals or small teams to spur distributed Carbon Dioxide Removal innovation. To facilitate maximum participation, creativity and speed, OpenAir has launched Carbon Crowd, a new platform to enable rapid progress on community hardware missions through continuous collaborative build projects every two months in different locations around the world.
This first iteration of Epiphyte is designed initially to serve as a research tool to enable quantitative studies on sorbents and the environments (temperature, vacuum, airflow, etc.) which provide the best prospects for building bigger DAC systems going forward.
The first physical Epiphyte will be built in August 2023 by a Philadelphia-based team of OpenAir volunteers. It will be constructed over a 2 month period in work space generously made available at the University of Pennsylvania's Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering Department, and with help and advice from faculty, staff and students, and OpenAir's global community of makers and researchers.
Subsequent builds will be sited at different locations all over the world, led by OpenAir members, with the goal of constructing at least one instance of Epiphyte every 2 months.
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