Simulations on Industrial Scale CO2 Capture Vacuum Pressure Swing Adsorption Using Mil-160(Al)

Nowadays, power generation and carbon-intensive industries (steel plants, cement plants, lime …) are responsible for around 50% of anthropogenic CO2 emissions to Earth’s atmosphere that mainly contributes to global warming. So, the reduction of CO2 emissions from industries is crucial. Absorption-regeneration amine-based process, the benchmark solution, suffers from high energy penalties that leads adsorption process a promising alternative thanks to improvement of process design and development of new materials. Among these materials, MOFs appears as very promising material for both gas separation and purification. In the present work, the performance of the MIL-160(Al) produce at large scale were evaluated by adsorption isotherm measurements and breakthrough curve experiment. A modelling procedure was applied to both experiments to determine the CO2 and N2 adsorption isotherm parameters and kinetic parameters on the adsorbent. The parameters obtained were used to simulate a VPSA process at an industrial scale (100 Nm³/h of flue gas, 15% of CO2) to evaluate the process performance of MIL-160(Al). Two different configurations were simulated for this study: a 2-stage VPSA process with 2 columns using 5 steps, and a 1-stage VPSA process with 3 columns and 6 steps. These configurations have been investigated and optimized to reach the targets of such a process: CO2 purity of 95% and recovery of 90% with the lowest energy consumption and highest productivity. After a first optimization of these processes based on a design of experiments, the targets are close for the 2-stage VPSA process and reached for the 3bed-6step cycle. This last cycle can be optimized to promote energy consumption (393.1 kJ/kgCO2) or productivity (0.1877 kgCO2/(kgads.h)). These results confirm the promising potential of this adsorbent for the use at an industrial scale.