Carbon dioxide emission from combustion of fossil fuels in stationary installations like power plants is environmentally problematic. Aqueous amine solutions may be used to capture the CO2 in scrubbers as carbamates, however low absorbent capacity (typically £7 wt%) and energy intensive operation (typically 30% of the total energy output) make the technology less attractive. Development of a viable and energy-efficient technology for CO2 capture by use of alternative, suitable absorbents like ionic liquids (ILs) is a promising alternative. However, most common ILs has limited gas absorption capacity due to relatively weak physisorption between the IL and CO2. To circumvent this drawback, task-specific ILs (TSILs) have been developed that can chemically bind CO2 to functionalized ILs at ambient conditions corresponding to 0.5-1 mol CO2/mol IL via intermolecular carbamate or carbamic acid formation. In this work, new functionalized amino acid-based ILs which demonstrates absorption capacity of 2 mol CO2/mol IL at 1 bar pressure is reported. The absorption process has been studied by means of in-situ ATR-FTIR, and correlated with implications from DFT calculations, to obtain mechanistic insight into the formation of carbamic acid.

Mechanistic investigations on CO2 capture with new amino acid-based ionic liquids

251st National Meeting (2016)

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