Suitability of a Solid Amine Sorbent for CO₂ Capture by Pressure Swing Adsorption

Abstract

This study showed that a solid amine, composed of poly(ethylenimine) immobilized into a CARiACT G10 silica substrate, is a feasible sorbent for applications in a pressure swing adsorption (PSA) process for postcombustion CO2 capture. This deduction materialized from an extensive study of the behavior of this material over a wide range of industrially relevant conditions using thermogravimetric analysis. The temperature ranged from 40 to 100 °C, the CO2 partial pressure ranged from 1.2 to 100 vol % with the total pressure fixed at 1 atm, the relative humidity ranged from dry conditions to 2 vol %, and the number of consecutive adsorption and desorption cycles ranged from 4 to 76. The results revealed that this solid amine sorbent was very stable under the conditions investigated. Water vapor at a low relative humidity exhibited only a minor and reversible effect on both the thermodynamics and kinetics of the CO2 uptake and release. The isothermal CO2 working capacity ranged between 0.25 and 2.8 mol/kg, increased with increasing CO2 concentration, exhibited a maximum with increasing temperature, and produced a heat of adsorption/reaction of around 50.0 kJ/mol. It was also determined that the optimal operating temperature for a PSA process was around 80 °C for CO2 partial pressures >10 kPa and 60−70 °C for CO2 partial pressures <10 kPa.

A Review of CO2 Capture by Absorption and Adsorption

“…The formed secondary amines exhibited a larger increase in cyclic CO 2 adsorption capacities than the primary amines. The supports including PMMA, polystyrene (PS) and silicon dioxide were also performed by the DOE/NTEL's group (Gray et al, 2009;Ebner et al, 2011;Jiang et al, 2011;. The nano-layered amine-based adsorbents using layer-by-layer nanoassembly technology via alternate deposition of PEI and an oppositely-charged polymer like PMMA and polystyrene sulfonate prepared by NTEL people were also used for CO 2 capture.…”

Efficient CO2 sorbents based on silica foam with ultra-large mesopores

“…Ritter et al also showed that porous silica (CARiACT G10 from Fuji Silysia) supported PEI423 sorbent had essentially no capacity loss after 78 concentration sweep cycles at 80 C. 45 In fact, it has recently been demonstrated that the sorbent degradation under dry CO 2 conditions depends on many factors, such as the nature of amines, the stripping gas and the desorption temperature.…”

Bayesian estimation of parametric uncertainties, quantification and reduction using optimal design of experiments for CO2 adsorption on amine sorbents

“…CO 2 removal by adsorption process is promising in terms of relatively high energy efficiency and is being investigated extensively in the community with several variations in the operating configurations such as vacuum, pressure or temperature swing, and also with varied sorbents (Choi et al, 2009;Chou and Chen, 2004;Ebner et al, 2011). One of the configurations is to perform rapid thermal swing (RTSA) (Lively et al, 2009) of CO 2 using amine sorbents supported in a hollow fiber configuration, which has been studied both experimentally and through models Rezeai et al, 2014;Kalyanaraman et al, 2014).…”