Study of novel solvent for CO2 post-combustion capture

Carbon dioxide post-combustion capture process using an aqueous solution of 30 wt% of monoethanolamine (MEA) is considered the most mature solution for CO2 removal from bulk CO2 gas streams. Although this amine based process is considered mature and has good performance characteristics such as good CO2 absorption and high kinetics; it has high energy requirement which is approximately 3.6-4 GJ/ton of CO2. This high energy demand is the driving force behind the research activities seeking novel solvents with lower energy consumption. This work focuses on the thermodynamic and kinetics characterization of new amine-based solvents to evaluate their potential for CO2 removal. A screening of different amines structure was done for the determination of the CO2 loading by using solvent screening setup (S.S.S.) at 313.15K and a pressure of 1 bar containing 15 %vol CO2 and 85 % vol N-2. For the evaluation of the heat of absorption, a micro-reaction calorimeter was used at 313.15K and atmospheric pressure with pure CO2. The kinetics properties were obtained with stopped-flow equipment to measure the pseudo-first order reaction k(0) (s(-1)) at 298.15, 303.15, 308.15 and 313.15K. The results show that two tertiary amines, 2-(dimethylamino) ethanol (2DMEA) and 3-dimethylamino-1-propanol (3DMA1P), have high potential to blend with primary or secondary amine in order to improve the CO2 loading, the heat of absorption and the reaction kinetics instead of using MDEA. (C) 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.