IntroductionClimate change and environmental problems caused by the emissions of carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) have attracted increasing attentions worldwide and the reduction of CO 2 has become a global issue [1,2]. Post combustion CO 2 capture using amine as absorbent is one of the mature technologies for reducing CO 2 emissions from coal-fired power plants [3][4][5][6][7][8]. Aqueous solutions of MDEA have been widely used for the removal of CO 2 form a variety of gas streams [9,10]. Besides the amine blends, adding a physical solvent to the aqueous solutions of alkanolamines is considered to be an effective method to lower the regeneration energy cost [11,12]. For example, Archane et al.[11] studied the vapor-liquid equilibria, the concentration of the molecular form of absorbed CO 2 , the partial pressure of CO 2 and the liquid phase speciation for CO 2 -poly(ethylene oxide)400 (PEG400)-diethanolamine (DEA) aqueous solutions, and demonstrated the influence of PEG400 on the absorption of CO 2 . Their results showed that lower energy cost can be achieved in regeneration because at a given CO 2 loading and constant concentration of DEA, the CO 2 molecular concentration increases with the increase of PEG400 concentration, whereas the ion repartition is not significantly influenced by the solvent composition. Henni and Mather [13] studied the solubility of CO 2 in a mixed nonaqueous solvent of MDEA and MeOH. The results showed that at low acid gas partial pressures the solubility of CO 2 is higher in the mixed solvent than in pure MeOH. A knowledge of surface tension is required when designing or simulating an absorption column for CO 2 capture. In recent years, there are many experimental and theoretical works concerning the surface tensions of aqueous solutions containing MDEA and physical solvent. Fu et al. [14] measured the surface tensions of PEG400, MEA-PEG400 and DEA-PEG400 aqueous solutions and satisfactorily modeled by using a thermodynamic equation. On the basis of experiments and calculation, they demonstrated the effects of the temperature, the mass fractions of amines and PEG400 on the surface tension. Fu et al. [15] studied the surface tensions of MDEA-piperazine (PZ) aqueous solutions. They proposed a theoretical model to correlate the surface tensions and the calculated results agreed well with