(587h) Feasibility Analysis of a Membrane System for Direct Air Capture of CO2

Human-induced climate change has been in the center of discussion of scientists and governments around the globe. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the alarming rate in which CO₂ concentration, one of the main pollutants, has been rising in the past 2 decades has not been seen in the past 800,000 years. Therefore, it has become crucial to take action in lowering the amount of greenhouse gases (GHGs) emitted. The consistent emissions of GHGs to the atmosphere have been linked to increasing the global average temperature, which lead to the retreat in glaciers and by consequence the rise in sea levels, more frequent floods, droughts and other severe weather conditions. In an effort to tackle these events, the development of technologies capable of capturing and storing CO₂has grown substantially, and along these lines, Direct Air Capture (DAC) for Carbon Capture Utilization and Sequestration (CCUS) appears as a novel approach. Differently from other CO₂capture processes, in DAC the process feed is pure air, not the endpoint of an already installed process. This makes it possible to build DAC plants closer to CO₂storage facilities or to processes that could use CO₂, reducing costs and emissions associated with shipping. In this work, the feasibility of membranes for performing CO₂capture in a DAC process will be assessed.

In particular, hollow-fiber polymeric membranes with different selectivities, surface areas and module arrangements are examined. For each scenario, assuming the feed conditions as pure air, in which the CO₂molar concentration is approximately 400 ppm, the energy consumption is assessed in order to lower the CO₂feed concentration to 300 ppm. The aforementioned scenarios are simulated in the AVEVA Process Simulation (APS) platform and the results are extracted using a Python script interface [1]. The simulation results are then analyzed by applying process operability techniques [2] in MATLAB/Python, in order to determine the most efficient arrangement for DAC. The feasible regions for each scenario will be compared to obtain the desired operating conditions and characteristics for the membrane, towards reaching an optimal level of CO₂capture.

References

[1] Bishop, B.A.; Lima, F.V. (2021). Novel Module-Based Design Algorithm for Intensified Membrane Reactor Systems. Processes, 9, 2165. https://doi.org/10.3390/pr9122165

[2] Gazzaneo, V.; Lima, F. V. (2019). Multilayer Operability Framework for Process Design, Intensification, and Modularization of Nonlinear Energy Systems. Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research, 58 (15), 6069-6079, DOI: 10.1021/acs.iecr.8b05482