3rd Post Combustion Capture Conference (PCCC3)

Study of Heat Duty of Catalyst-Aided Amine-based CO2

Capture Process
Wayuta Srisang1, Fatemeh Pouryousefi1, Priscilla Anima Osei1, Benjamin Decardi-
Nelson1, Ananda Akachuku1, Raphael Idem1*, Paitoon Tontiwachwuthikul1
Clean Energy Technologies Institute, University of Regina, 3737 Wascana Parkway, Regina, Canada S4S0A2

Keywords: heat duty; catalyst aided desorption, solid acid catalyst, HZSM-5

1. Introduction

It has been demonstrated that CO2 capture by absorption using amine-based solvents is currently the most
applicable and effective approach in post-combustion capture processes. However, the major drawback of this
technology is the large energy requirement for solvent regeneration for stripping of CO2 from CO2-loaded amine
solution. The energy input to the regeneration process is made up of three main parts, namely, (i) sensible heat for
raising the temperature of the rich amine to the stripping temperature, (ii) heat of desorption for the endothermic
reaction of CO2 stripping and (iii) heat of vaporization to create enough steam and pressure in the stripper associated
with the CO2 stripping. This work studied the reduction of heat duty as a result of the utilization of catalysts to
accelerate CO2 stripping in the desorption column. Earlier work has demonstrated that the use of a solid acid catalyst
in the stripper allows CO2 stripping out of amine to occur at a lower temperature. Therefore, the required sensible
heat and vaporization heat in the process are lower. In this work, a novel full cycle lab scale CO2 absorption process
using hot water as heating source and a solid acid catalyst were used to lower the energy requirement in the desorber
column in order to determine how the constituents of heat duty varied with the type of solid acid catalyst, mass (w)
of catalyst used and the stripping temperature.

2. Experimental Section

The process flow diagram of the experimental set up is shown in the Figure 1 (a). It consists of the absorber and
desorber columns, amine tank, lean-rich heat exchanger, and hot water heat exchanger. The absorber and desorber
were made of stainless steel with the diameter of 0.05 m and a height of 1.50 m. The absorber contained 0.016 m
pall ring random packing. Unlike the absorber, the desorber was divided into 5 sections packed as shown in Figure 1
(b). The middle section was a catalyst bed section containing the desired catalysts mixed with inert marble of the
same particle size. The hot water heat exchanger in the process was used for heating the rich amine after the lean-

* Corresponding author. Tel.: 01-306-585-4470; fax: 01-306-585-4855.

E-mail address: Raphael.idem@uregina.ca.
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rich heat exchanger. Then, the hot rich amine from the hot water heat exchanger was directly fed to the desorber.
Unlike this process, the conventional process has reboiler at the bottom of desorber to heat the amines and create
steam. Two catalysts were studied, namely -Al2O3 and HZSM-5 to test their catalytic performance in CO2
stripping. Three different amine solvents were used in this work including 5M MEA, 5M MEA + 2M MDEA and
5M MEA + 1.25M DEAB. The inlet gas composition was 15 % CO2 mixed in balance nitrogen with a flow rate
(FAo) of 15 SLPM which passed through a water saturator cell before it was introduced to the bottom of the
absorber. The experiments were performed by flowing the amine through the columns as follows. The lean amine
from the amine tank was introduced to the top of the absorber which exited at the bottom of the absorber as the rich
amine. The rich amine was pump to the lean rich heat exchanger and then the hot water heat exchanger prior to
being introduced to the stripper column from the top. The lean amine solution coming out from the stripper bottom
after CO2 stripping was cooled down and flowed to the amine tank. When steady state was attained and the system
reached stability, both the absorption efficiency and the heat duty were calculated.

(a) (b)

Figure 1: (a). Process flow diagram of the lab scale CO2 absorption process unit with hot water as the heating
source (b). Structure of stripper

3. Results

Figure 2 shows the results of the heat duty and absorption efficiency for 5 M MEA with -Al2O3. It can be seen
that with an increase in the w/FA0 (which is the weight of catalyst in g over the molar flow rate of amine), the heat
duty of the system drastically reduced. It can be seen that there was a reduction from 26.16 (with no catalyst) to 6.66
(w/FAo = 1.2) GJ/tonne CO2 representing a reduction of 74.5%. This is because the CO2 was stripped out more when
the weight of -Al2O3 increased as observed in the decrease of the lean amine loading. The higher the CO2 stripped,
the leaner the amine fed to the absorber. This also affected the absorption efficiency which increased from 9 % in
non catalyst system to 35% for w/FA0 = 1.6.
 Srisang et al./ Energy Procedia 00 (2015) 000000 3

Figure 2. The effect of w/FA0 on reboiler heat duty and absorption efficiency

4. Summary

The solid acid catalyst drastically reduced the heat duty for solvent regeneration.