Post-combustion CO2 capture with a commercial activated carbon: Comparison of different regeneration strategies

Abstract A commercial activated carbon supplied by Norit, R2030CO2, was evaluated as CO 2 adsorbent under conditions relevant to post-combustion CO 2 capture (ambient pressure and diluted CO 2 ). It has been demonstrated that this carbon possesses sufficient CO 2 /N 2 selectivity in order to efficiently separate a binary mixture composed of 17% CO 2 in N 2 . Moreover, this carbon was easily completely regenerated and it did not show capacity decay after 10 consecutive cycles. Three different regeneration strategies were compared in a single-bed adsorption unit: temperature swing adsorption (TSA), vacuum swing adsorption (VSA) and a combination of them, vacuum and temperature swing adsorption (VTSA). Through a simple two step TSA cycle, CO 2 was concentrated from 17 to 43 vol%. For the single-bed cycle configurations, the productivity and CO 2 recovery followed the sequence: TSA  −1  h −1 and a maximum CO 2 recovery of 97% were reached.

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