Impacts of Thermo-Physical Properties on Chemical Absorption for CO2 Capture

Sammanfattning: Following the climate change mitigation target in Paris agreement, the global warming has to be limited to 2.0°C above the preindustrial levels. One of the potential methods is carbon capture and storage (CCS), which can significantly reduce the CO2 emissions from the vast point sources such as power plants, industries, and natural gas processes. The CCS covers four steps which are capture, conditioning, transport, and storage. For the capture part, post-combustion capture is easier to implement based on today’s technologies and infrastructure compared with pre-combustion and oxy-fuel combustion captures, since the radical changes in the structure of the existing plant are not required.To design and operate different CCS processes, the knowledge of thermo-physical properties of the CO2 mixtures is of importance. In this thesis, the status and progress of the studies related to the impacts of the uncertainty in thermo-physical properties on the design and operation of the CCS processes were reviewed. The knowledge gaps and the priority of property model development were identified.According to the identified knowledge gaps in the review, the impacts of thermo-physical properties which are the density, viscosity, and diffusivity of the gas and liquid phases, and the surface tension and heat capacity of the liquid phase on the design of the absorber column for the chemical absorption using aqueous monoethanolamine were quantitatively analyzed. An in-house rate-based absorption model was developed in MATLAB to simulate the absorption process, and the sensitivity study was done for each property. An economic evaluation was also performed to further estimate the impacts of the properties on the capital cost of the absorption unit. For column diameter of the absorber, the gas phase density shows the most significant impacts; while, the liquid phase density and viscosity show the most significant impacts on the design of the packing height and also the capital cost of the absorption unit. Therefore, developing the flue gas density model and liquid phase density and viscosity models of the aqueous solvents with CO2 loading should be prioritized.