(693e) Single Column VSA Studies for CO2 Recovery Using Metal Organic Frame Work Adsorbent: Comparison with Commercial Zeolite

Single Column VSA
Studies for CO₂ Recovery using Metal Organic Frame Work Adsorbent: Comparison
with Commercial Zeolite

Aarti
Arya, Soumen Dasgupta, Swapnil Divekar, Anshu Nanoti*, Amar N. Goswami and
Madhukar O. Garg

Indian Institute of
Petroleum, Dehradun-248005, India.

Anne
Andersen, Jasmina Hafizovic Cavka & Richard Blom

SINTEF
Materials & Chemistry, P.O.Box 124 Blindern, 0314 Oslo, Norway

Rising
levels of CO₂ in the atmosphere due to burning of fossil fuel have
been recognized to be the main contributor of global warming and associated
climate change phenomenon.  Fossil fuel combustion for power generation is the
major source of increased CO₂ levels in the atmosphere, but
capturing CO₂ from flue gas emissions in power plants where it is
available as a low pressure stream, presents a formidable challenge. Current
technologies available such as amine based absorption processes are considered
uneconomic and there is a concerted effort being made to improve such processes
or develop more efficient alternative processes. In this context adsorption
processes using Pressure or Vacuum Swing Adsorption (PSA/VSA) are attracting
interest as energy requirements are lower [1].

Solid
adsorbents like zeolites and activated carbons can be used to recover CO₂
from flue gas mixtures by pressure swing adsorption technique.Several adsorbent
materials have been investigated for CO₂ recovery by PSA/VSA. The
general consensus appears to be that Zeolite 13X materials performs better than
activated carbons or silica gels [2][3]. Both capacities and selectivities for
separation of CO₂/N₂ mixtures (representative of flue
gases from power plants) are superior. However, as CO₂ isotherms on
zeolites are nonlinear, power requirement during regeneration can be high and
there is for this reason a large scope for developing new adsorbents which will
show better selectivity and regenerability.

Metal
Organic Frameworks (MOF) is a new class of adsorbents   attracting interest for
selective CO₂ separation [4][5]. These are materials in which metal
ions or clusters are connected via organic linkers to form highly porous
network structures. Several MOF's have been proposed as adsorbents for CO₂
recovery. These include  MOF-47  [Vanadium (IV) benzene 1,4 dicarboxylate ],
MIL-53 [Chromium (III) benzene 1,4 dicarboxylate]  and CuBTC [ Copper(II)
benzene 1,3,5 tri carboxylate]. However, the several studies that have been
reported so far on CO₂ adsorption on MOF's have been limited mostly
to equilibrium isotherm and diffusion measurements with pure components [6,7,8,9].
The present paper  reports an experimental study on the separation of CO₂
from mixtures with nitrogen using UIO-66 (Zr₆O₄(OH)₄(1,4-dicarboxybenzene))MOF
adsorbent [10], in a vacuum swing adsorber operating with a heavy reflux or
rinse cycle typically used for recovery of the strong adsorptive (in this case,
CO₂) from gas mixtures. UIO-66 is an in-house synthesised MOF that can
be formulated easily in suitable forms for column operation. The results are
compared with performance data generated with commercialZeolite 13X under
comparable operating conditions. The study shows that UIO-66 performs
satisfactorily in long term column operation and there was no performance
deterioration noted. CO₂ recoveries are higher than observed with
the zeolite while CO₂ purities are lower.

*Corresponding
author

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