Adsorption of carbon dioxide and water vapor on fly-ash based ETS-10

Abstract

CO2 capture from humid flue gas is always costly due to the irreplaceable pretreatment of dehydration in current processes, which creates an urgent demand for moisture-insensitive adsorbents with considerable CO2 uptakes as well as remarkable H2O tolerances. In the present work, the microporous titanium silicate molecular sieve ETS-10 was synthesized with coal fly ash as the only silica source. The as-synthesized ETS-10 was characterized by X-ray diffraction, scanning electronic microscopy and infrared spectroscopy to verify its crystal morphology, in which neither impurity nor aggregation was observed. The following CO2 adsorption experiments on the thermal gravimetric analyzer demonstrated its similar CO2 adsorption capacity yet dramatical adsorption kinetics among some other microporous materials, e.g., potassium chabazite. These specific properties consequently guaranteed its favorable CO2 adsorption capacity even at high temperatures (1.35 mmol/g at 393 K) and shortened the breakthrough time of single CO2 flow to less than 20 s. In CO2/H2O binary breakthrough experiments, the as-obtained ETS-10 still maintained excellent CO2 uptake of 0.81 mmol/g at 323 K, regardless of the presence of water vapor, making it a promising substitute for direct CO2 separation from humid flue gases at practical conditions of post-combustion adsorption.