Simulation of a novel hybrid membrane-cryogenic process for post-combustion carbon capture

Abstract

The global warming effect caused by CO2 emissions has a significant impact on human activities. Membrane technology has been regarded as a potential promising separation technology due to its low energy-consumption and low carbon footprint. In recent decades, numerous researches on CO2 selective membranes have been reported for carbon capture. The emergence of N2 selective membranes with “reversed N2/CO2 selectivity” property provides a novel perspective for carbon capture process with high efficiency and low energy consumption. However, there is still a gap in the study of N2 selective membranes in hybrid carbon capture process. In present work, a novel hybrid N2 selective membrane-cryogenic process was designed for post-combustion carbon capture. The result indicated that N2 selective membrane-cryogenic hybrid process had an advantage of low membrane area demand and capture cost. The carbon capture cost and energy consumption of the optimization case were $28.17/tCO2 and 1.46 GJ/tCO2, respectively. And it was also found that developing N2 selective membranes with high N2/CO2 selectivity was more promising than that with high N2 permeance in hybrid membrane-cryogenic carbon capture process.