As concerns mount about the rise in atmospheric CO₂ concentrations, many different routes to reduce CO₂ emissions have been proposed. Of these, post-combustion CO₂ capture from coal-fired power stations is often the most controversial, as the CO₂ capture system will remove generating capacity from the grid whereas many of the other solutions involve increasing the generating capacity of the grid with low CO₂-emission plants. Despite this, coal-fired power stations represent a major point source for CO₂ emissions, and if a consensus is reached on the need to reduce CO₂ emissions, a low-cost method for capturing and storing the CO₂ released by these power plants needs to be developed. The overarching goal of this research is to design and develop a novel hollow fiber sorbent system for post-combustion CO₂ capture.
To achieve this goal, three objectives were developed to guide this research: i) develop a conceptual framework for hollow fiber sorbents that focuses on the energetic requirements of the system, ii) demonstrate that hollow fiber sorbents can be created, and a defect-free lumen layer can be made, iii) perform proof-of-concept CO₂ sorption experiments to confirm the validity of this approach to CO₂ capture. Each of these objectives is addressed in the body of this dissertation.
Work on the first objective showed that fiber sorbents can combine the energetic advantages of a physi-/chemi-sorption process utilizing a solid sorbent while mitigating the process deficiencies associated with using solid sorbents in a typical packed bed. All CO₂ capture technologies--including fiber sorbents--were shown to be highly parasitic to a host power plant in the absence of effective heat integration. Fiber sorbents have the unique advantage that heat integration is enabled most effectively by the hollow fiber morphology: the CO₂-sorbing fibers can behave as "adsorbing heat exchangers."
A dry-jet, wet-quench based hollow fiber spinning process was utilized to spin fibers that were 75wt% solid sorbent (zeolite 13X) and 25wt% support polymer (cellulose acetate). The spinning process was consistent and repeatable, allowing for production of large quantities of fibers. The fibers were successfully post-treated with an emulsion-based polymer (polyvinylidene chloride) to create a defect-free lumen side coating that was an excellent barrier to both water and gas permeation. A film study was conducted to elucidate the dominant factors in the formation of a defect-free film, and these factors were used for the creation of defect-free lumen layers. The work discussed in this thesis shows that the second objective of this work was definitively achieved.
For the third objective, sorption experiments conducted on the fiber sorbents indicated that the fiber sorbents CO₂ uptake is simply a weighted average of the support material CO₂ uptake and the solid sorbent uptake. Furthermore, kinetic experiments indicate that CO₂ access to the sorbents is not occluded noticeably by the polymer matrix. Using the fiber sorbents in a simulated rapid thermal swing adsorption cycle provided evidence for the fiber sorbents ability to capture the sorption enthalpy released by the CO₂-13X interaction. Finally, a slightly more-pure CO₂ product was able to be generated from the fiber sorbents via a thermal swing/inert purge process.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:GATECH/oai:smartech.gatech.edu:1853/43758 |
| Date | 18 January 2011 |
| Creators | Lively, Ryan P. |
| Publisher | Georgia Institute of Technology |
| Source Sets | Georgia Tech Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Archive |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Dissertation |
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