Enhancing CO₂ absorption/desorption by amine based nanoparticle suspensions

Absorption and desorption with faster kinetics are capable of reducing the size of absorber and stripper, and hence reducing the total cost of CO₂ removal. In this work, we introduced nanoparticles to enhance the CO₂ absorption and desorption with aqueous amine solutions. It is verified that particle Brownian movement and convective motion induced by Brownian movement contribute to the increase of liquid-side mass transfer coefficient. We investigated the effects of nanoparticles on three different kinds of solutions (30% MEA, 30% MDEA and 1.5 mol/L PZ) and find that the corresponding influence of nanoparticles are quite different. We attribute the differences to the viscosities of solutions, which are likely to have significant influence on CO₂ diffusion. Furthermore, we investigated the effects of SiO₂, Al₂O₃, TiO₂, CuO nanoparticles on the enhancement of the solvent regeneration. Solvent with TiO₂ shows the highest desorption ability, following by CuO, SiO₂ and Al₂O₃.