A novel contactor for reducing the cost of direct air capture of CO2

Abstract

Carbon dioxide removal from air, also known as Direct Air Capture (DAC), is gaining more attention due to the importance of negative emissions and their impact on reversing climate change. However, CO2 removal cost remains a major obstacle for widespread DAC adoption. A significant portion of DAC cost is due to its CO2 adsorbent. Here, we present a novel monolithic DAC contactor backed by a validated model displaying enhanced mass transfer, markedly increasing the CO2 capture rate. The contactor employs helical channels, rather than commonplace straight channels, forming a highly convective Dean flow augmenting CO2 transport and release to/from the sorbent layer coated on the monolith channel walls. It is shown that the novel contactor can capture the same CO2 using about 35% less adsorbent when compared to straight channel contactors. Techno-economic analysis shows the new contactor can reduce the overall DAC cost by about 30%.