Modelling and parametric comparison of separation efficiency for several membrane-based CO2 removal systems

ANA M. ARIAS; MIGUEL C. MUSSATI; NICOLÁS J. SCENNA; SERGIO F. MUSSATI

Paris

Conferencia; ICCBE15 International Conference on Chemical and Biochemical Engineering; 2015

C3i/Polytechnic Institute of Portalegre (Portugal) and University of Extremadura (Spain)

The mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions is essential for a sustainable development. CO2 emission is considered to be the main responsible of the global warming. Because of the high energy-efficiency and low cost, membranes have been successfully applied for several gas and/or liquid separations and purifications and therefore they can be used for CO2 capture. However, only a few articles that discuss the potential application of membranes for CO2 capture have been published. The main objective of this paper is to compare, an equal total membrane area available in the entire process, the performance of the following three membrane-based CO2 removal systems: a) single membrane system, b) three-stage membrane system, c) four-stage membrane system. The comparison is given in terms of the CO2 purity and recovery and total specific power required. A fixed total membrane area of 30.857 m2 is assumed in all of the configurations. For each process configuration, a NLP optimization mathematical model is proposed in order to determine the optimal operating conditions that maximize the CO2 recovery (single objective function). As will be described later, in the three-stage membrane and four-stage membrane systems it will also be required to determine how the total membrane area must be optimally distributed in each one of the stages.