RESEARCH PAPER
Effect of water vapor from power station flue gas on CO2 capture by vacuum swing adsorption with activated carbon

https://doi.org/10.1016/S1872-5813(11)60016-9Get rights and content

Abstract

Due to the high absolute humidity of real flue gas, activated carbon, a hydrophobic adsorbent, was used to selectively adsorb CO2 by vacuum swing adsorption in this study. The objective of this work is to study the feasibility and advantage of CO2 capture along with simultaneous moisture removal by activated carbon and the effect of H2O on CO2 capture from wet flue gas streams. Through experiment and analysis, the “S” shape isotherms of water indicated water was easier to be desorbed from activated carbon. Then a cone shape model was proposed to depict water distribution inside the adsorption bed. As a consequence, water vapor hardly influenced the CO2 capture performance. Moreover, the process can be operated under a relatively high vacuum pressure and short evacuation time. The preliminary results showed that our one-bed VSA process could yield a good CO2 recovery of over 80% and a reasonable purity of 43%.

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      Citation Excerpt :

      To understand this, AC was used to selectively adsorb CO2 from flue gas with high absolute humidity using VSA with the simultaneous removal of water. A cone shaped model was proposed to depict the water distribution inside the adsorption bed under different humidities, which indicates that the presence of water vapor hardly affects the CO2 capture performance [118]. A similar observation was also made by Chiang et al., who noted minimal effect on water on CO2 adsorption capacity while working with KOH activated and TEPA aminated microporous AC fibers [119].

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    Foundation item: Supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (51074205) and Corporate Research Centre for Greenhouse Gas Technology Foundation in Australia.

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