Evaluating Different Classes of Porous Materials for Carbon Capture

Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) is one of the promising ways to significantly reduce the emission of CO₂ from power plants. The separation and compression of CO₂, however, is currently considered the most energy consumptive part. It is therefore important to find adequate materials to reduce the energy load additionally imposed on a power plant, which necessitates the development of a suitable metric to rank those materials. The concept of parasitic energy is a potential means for the evaluation of CCS materials. By combining thermodynamic properties and optimizing the process conditions the parasitic energy requirement can be determined on a material-by-material basis. Ranking materials according to their energy efficiency in CCS not only provides a direct comparison to current state-of-art technologies like MEA but also enables the application to different capturing strategies.

Over 50 different materials, including metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), zeolitic imidazolate frameworks (ZIFs), porous polymer networks (PPNs), zeolites, and hypothetical materials were analyzed using the approach of parasitic energy and compared to the results of other suggested ranking strategies such as selectivity and working capacity. Furthermore, the influence of different regeneration techniques as well as the impact of the adopted prediction model for mixture adsorptions on the parasitic load were investigated.