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; International Conference on Chemical and Biochemical Engineering; 2015

University of Extremadura

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 energyefficiency, 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.