Breakthrough Adsorption Study Using Activated Carbon and Molecular Sieve for CO2 Capture

The increased levels of carbon dioxide in the environment have incited the search of breakthrough technologies to lessen their impact on climate. The fixed bed CO2 adsorption study has been carried out using two-grades of adsorbents from CO2/N2 feed. The molecular sieve 3Å and porous carbon prepared from low-cost date stone were used for the adsorption study. BET analyser and a scanning electron microscope were used to analyze the surface and morphological characteristics of activated carbons. The result of temperature, flow rate, initial carbon dioxide concentration levels in feed on breakthrough behaviour was analysed. The adsorption response was explored in terms of breakthrough and saturation points, CO2 uptake, temperature profiles, effective column efficiency, usable bed height, utilization factor and length of mass transfer zone. The vastly steep breakthrough curves produced under different operating conditions reveals satisfactory utilisation of adsorbent capacity at breakthrough condition. The CO2 uptake of 73.08 mg/g was attained having high effective column capacity of 0.938 at 298 K for synthesized activated carbon. The activated carbon AC-SY performs better with lessen LMTZ of 1.20 cm and improved utilization factor of 0.97 at Co=5 % and 298 K. The findings of study suggest that activated carbon developed from date stone is highly encouraging to capture CO2 from CO2/N2 mixture using continuous fixed bed column