Evaluation of the protic ionic liquid, N,N-dimethyl-aminoethylammonium formate for CO2 capture
Introduction
Carbon dioxide capture processes are most commonly conducted using fast aqueous amine solutions such as 30 wt% monoethanolamine (MEA) in water. Although these systems exhibit positive characteristics such as fast kinetics and favourable vapour–liquid equilibria; high regeneration energies due to high water content and reaction enthalpies, in addition to impurity formation, makes it an expensive process. Room temperature ionic liquids (RTILs) are a new type of solvent that could be an improvement on this current system. To date much work has been conducted on the development of RTILs as physical solvents, however there has also been renewed focus on the development of RTILs as chemical solvents (Bates et al., 2002, Brennecke and Gurkan, 2010, Sanchez et al., 2007, Wang et al., 2010, Yang et al., 2011) as discussed in a number of recent reviews(MacFarlane et al., 2014).
Although novel solvent development is a priority, so is the development of process designs that can adequately contact these RTILs with the CO2 rich gas stream and promote CO2 mass transfer. A key limitation to this is the generally high viscosity of RTILs. Of these works, Zhang et al., 2011, Zhang et al., 2013 developed a rotating packed bed reactor to improve the mass transfer performance for a viscous amino-functionalized RTIL. Iliuta et al. (2014) took a different approach and mixed an amine, diethanolamine (DEA) with a RTIL ([hmim][NTf2]) in a stirred cell reactor, which upon loading with carbon dioxide formed a carbamate precipitate. The precipitate could then be separated from the solution and heated to release the CO2 thereby reducing the regeneration energy penalty. In this process the ionic liquid did not undergo a chemical reaction with the CO2. Yang et al. (2014) conducted a similar study although the combination was 30 wt% MEA, 40 wt% [bmim][BF4] and 30 wt% water and the solvent was contacted with the CO2 rich stream via a polypropylene membrane contactor. This process design was found to have a number of benefits over the industry standard 30 wt% MEA including: (1) the energy consumption was found to be 37.2% lower, (2) the MEA loss was reduced, and (3) mixing the ionic liquid with water reduced the solution viscosity, thereby improving CO2 diffusivity. Other methods to incorporate RTILs into CO2 capture processes have been investigated, including their immobilisation onto porous microspheres (Wang et al., 2013). However, in these systems, although reasonable capacities and kinetics have been observed, it has been found that the ionic liquid can leak into the bulk gas phases thereby reducing working capacity.
In this work, potential use of the ionic liquid, N,N-dimethyl-aminoethylammonium formate (DMEDAH formate) was evaluated for carbon dioxide capture via a number of testing methods including evaluation of:
- (1)
physical properties, to understand how easily the solvent may be utilised in an gas liquid solvent contactor;
- (2)
vapour–liquid equilibrium (VLE), to obtain an appreciation of the volume of solvent that may be required;
- (3)
mass transfer kinetics, to gauge the size of equipment and recirculation rates required; and
- (4)
operation with a polypropylene membrane contactor, to assess system practicality.
DMEDAH formate was selected for this trial as it was previously reported to show similar CO2 uptake characteristics as MEA (Vijayraghavan et al., 2013), and appreciable CO2 desorption was shown to occur at low temperature (above 25 °C). Therefore, this ionic liquid could provide an energy efficient reversible CO2 capture medium, unlike MEA which can require heating up to 140 °C before CO2 desorption. In addition, the low temperature CO2 desorption characteristic of the ionic liquid would also result in a significant reduction in thermal and oxidative degradation processes that result in solvent loss and formation of toxic compounds.
To assist in the interpretation of the solvent performance, the results are compared to the industry standard 30 wt% MEA.
Section snippets
Physical properties
Contact angle measurements between 100, 30 and 0 wt% DMEDAH formate (balance Milli-Q water) with polypropylene and PTFE were conducted using the sessile drop technique. This was achieved with a contact angle goniometer interfaced to FTÅ200 software (First Ten Ångstroms Inc., Software Version 2.0 Build Number 187, UK) which used “drop shape” analysis to analyse drop shape and size and to calculate the contact angle. A Sterlitect laminated membrane filter of pore size 0.05 μm provided surfaces of
Physical properties
An important physical property for solvent absorption processes, especially those utilising ionic liquids, is solution viscosity (Bates et al., 2002). Viscosity of DMEDAH formate has been reported previously (Vijayraghavan et al., 2013) (105 mPa s compared to 30 wt% MEA at 2.3 mPa s). High viscosity impacts on the mass transfer coefficient due to its relationship with diffusivity. Diffusivity is generally described by the semi-empirical Wilke–Chang equation (Wilke and Chang, 1955), which suggests
Conclusions
CO2 separation through use of the RTIL, DMEDAH formate has been demonstrated and valuable information regarding the vapour–liquid equilibrium, mass transfer kinetics and use in membrane contactors gathered. DMEDAH formate was found to have a lower working capacity over the temperature range of 15–35 °C and slower kinetics than the industrial standard, 30 wt% MEA. However at low CO2 loadings and before the membrane pores became wetted, it exhibited similar performance to MEA in a gas–solvent
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