Development of new absorber technologies for carbon capture and usage

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The damage to the environment due to burning fossil fuels is an established fact, and the development of mopping up technologies have been developed over the last three decades. These include hot potassium carbonate solutions, Amines and other absorbents. Almost all systems require gas-liquid contactors as the first unit operation. Considering the flue gas volumetric flowrates, the absorber towers in these systems are the most dominating structures leading to columns up to 10 m diameters. This makes the footprint of the carbon capture unit large compared to the industrial site that emits the CO2. Capital investment and operational costs are considerably large, making the economic feasibility and adaptability of carbon capture challenging to many industries. In this backdrop, an ambitious and adventurous research programme has been developed to assess the feasibility of downsizing the gas-liquid contact process by developing a new family of contactors. This includes modifying venture ejectors to achieve large interfacial area per unit volume of gas. The research programme has been developed together with a leading ejector manufacturing company, Transvac, in Alfreton. The use of their ejector technology as a process contactor will reduce the size and capital costs of CCU plant and equipment to a point, so they become desirable for end-users. To develop a product suitable for carbon capture, an in-depth understanding of both the competing phenomena that take place within efficiency ejectors, and how using ejectors to replace the contactors in the CCU process can reduce the cost, efficiency, and size of the CCU plant. The research programme is mainly focused on evaluating the performance of the suggested technology. This includes a considerable experimental campaign collecting data and analysing them to develop empirical models. The team working on this project has considerable experience in developing ejector technology, two-phase flow experimentation and data analysis and will be involved at every stage of the programme.