(411c) Evaluation of Surface-Functionalized Nanoparticle Ionic Materials for CO2 Capture

Climate change due to greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel combustion has become a global environmental challenge, while it is predicted that petroleum, coal, and natural gas continue to be the primary fuel energy sources for foreseeable future. Therefore, technologies that efficiently capture and store greenhouse gases including carbon dioxide are necessitated. To date, the most widely used CO2 capture methods are based on amine-functionalized solvents such as monoethnolamine (MEA). MEA has a high capacity to react with CO2, however this method has some drawbacks. Most notably its relatively high vapor pressure leads to fugitive emissions during the regeneration process, and due to its corrosive nature, MEA can only be used as a dilute aqueous solution. Besides the volatility and deactivation issues of MEA, the high parasitic energy consumption of this approach has resulted in the need for more efficient CO2 capture technologies.

In this study, surface-functionalized nanoparticle ionic materials (NIMS) are synthesized for CO2 scrubbing. These novel ionic materials, NIMS, have immeasurable vapor pressure, which is a competitive advantage over amine scrubbing. However, both mechanistic and kinetic understandings of its CO2 capture process are currently lacking. Thus, a high pressure reactor setup, which is equipped with a pressure transducer, is designed to carry out the experiments under various operating conditions. The CO2 absorption isotherms for NIMS, other ionic materials (e.g., conventional and task-specific ionic liquids), and MEA solvent are investigated and compared as a function of CO2 partial pressure and temperature. The physical and chemical designs of NIMS are optimized for the maximum CO2 capture capacity with minimum energy requirement for the regeneration.