Studies on carbon dioxide capture using polymer based carbon adsorbents

Abstract

Carbon dioxide (CO2), a major greenhouse gas, is one of the greatest challenges of the twenty-first century. Its increase in the atmosphere is mainly due to fossil-fuel power sector and energy-intensive industries. Consequences like global warming and climate change concerns initiated global efforts to reduce CO2 concentration. Among the various mitigation pathways, CO2 capture and storage (CCS) technology is attracting higher interest which can lower down the release of CO2 into the atmosphere. Pre-combustion, post-combustion, and oxy-fuel combustion are the CCS technologies among which post combustion is considered as economic and green technologies. The available post-combustion technologies for CO2 capture are absorption, adsorption, cryogenic distillation, and membrane separation. Mature technology like absorption has been used most but it is having disadvantages like high regeneration cost, equipment corrosion, and amine oxidative degradation. Adsorption is believed to be economically and least interfering ways due to its easy application as it fulfills the objective of very small modification to power plants, less energy penalty and low equipment cost. Therefore, for post-combustion CO2 capture, there is a great need for the development of adsorbent materials with high adsorption capacity, selectivity and fast kinetics coupled with good thermal and mechanical stability. Carbon based adsorbents are found to be attractive and have been extensively used for CO2 adsorption due to its high surface area, lesser amount of energy for regeneration, good thermal/mechanical stability and hydrophobicity. It was seen that many researchers were trying to develop adsorbent either by direct carbonization or by physical/chemical activation. Also, they tried to evaluate their uptake capacity mainly under static condition at room temperature. But, the disadvantage of their studies is both the synthesis and performance evaluation.