Application of carbon fibre composites to CO2 capture from flue gas

Abstract The application of large sized honeycomb structured monolithic carbon fibre composites (HMCFC) to CO 2 capture was evaluated experimentally using simulated flue gas in 2.0 m long, large sized adsorption column. The average adsorption capacity of pure CO 2 on the HMCFC, was 11.9 wt% (mass uptake) at ambient temperature and pressure. With a simulated flue gas (at 298 K) consisting of 13 vol% CO 2 (partial pressure 13 kPa), 5.5% of O 2 and the balance N 2 , the CO 2 capture efficiency during the adsorption breakthrough study was found to be over 98%. After adsorption, thermal regeneration that was applied at 398 K without any inert gas purge to recover the adsorbed gas, resulted in a desorbed CO 2 gas concentration of up to 100%, but with a CO 2 recovery of less than 20% while vacuum regeneration (up to 30 kPa) yielded less than 5% CO 2 . However, combined thermal and vacuum regeneration was found to be an effective CO 2 desorption strategy to achieve very high CO 2 recovery and purity. Also, after the flue gas adsorption step, when the adsorbents were flushed with specific quantitites of CO 2 , more concentrated CO 2 in the desorbed gas was obtained. Under optimum operating conditions, the desorbed gas exhibited a CO 2 concentration of 100% with recovery from the input flue gas of over 97%. The carbon fibre composite adsorbents showed very good mechanical stability, and were unaffected by water from moisture condensation during regeneration experiments with repeated heating and cooling.

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