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Epiphyte! Open Source Direct Air Capture for Carbon Removal Hackers

This summer we are on a mission to finalize our V1 Epiphyte prototype. We need your help.

Author

OpenAir
July 01, 2024

Greetings open source direct air capture enthusiasts!

OpenAir’s Epiphyte Mission is making great progress as we head into summer 2024, but we could use some more brains and eyeballs to accelerate its progress. Can you join us and contribute to this evolving global effort to drive innovation in Direct Air Capture through open source, crowd-based collaboration?

Check out this short tour of our first Epiphyte prototype, completed in Dec 2023, at the University of Pennsylvania’s Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering Lab.

Mission Fundamentals

  • Epiphyte is a desk-scale, open source direct air capture (DAC)* prototype designed by volunteer members of the OpenAir Collective.

  • The objective of the mission is to both expand interest and participation in the Direct Air Capture space among students, hobbyists and other independent hackers, while maximizing creativity from multi-disciplinary contributions to realize novel approaches and innovation.

  • We built the first prototype at the University of Pennsylvania’s Chemical Engineering Lab at the end of 2023. It’s a solid start but …

  • This summer we are working to fix certain elements of the design, and get to a functional working system that others can replicate and hack on all over the world as part of our growing community.

Join us!

  • We envision a future for Epiphyte’s evolution that is driven by teams all over the world, anchored in universities, maker spaces, and even garages and basements. If you are interested in joining our group - as an individual or as a member of a team at your university or organization - fill out this short form, and we’ll be in touch.

  • Thursday Live Stream: Our team live streams our weekly Thursday meetups on Youtube (2pm ET), during which we work through tasks, optimizations and new ideas for the design. You can check out our stream meetup calendar here to watch and contribute ideas.

Join our Discord Server’s Epiphyte Channel. Here’s where we talk about and share updates between Streams on our progress. Jump in and share your ideas, and get up to speed.

Resources to get you up to speed on the project.