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

ANA MARISA ARIAS; MIGUEL MUSSATI,; NICOLÁS J. SCENNA; SERGIO F. MUSSATI

Paris

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

C3i/Polytechnic Institute of Portalegre (Portugal) y 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 low cost and high energy-efficiency, 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 the performance of the three membrane-based CO2 removal systems illustrated in Fig. 1 to 3. 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 a result, in the Config. 2 and 3 it is also required to determine how the total membrane area must be optimally distributed in each one of the stages.