Fossil fuels, which significantly contribute to anthropogenic CO2 emissions, are likely to remain the main source of energy in the foreseeable future. Therefore, the development of efficient carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies is one of the great challenges faced by humanity. A new advancement in the area of CCS includes the development of the third-generation CO2 capture materials. While a wide range of materials have been developed to capture CO2 from flue gas ranging from aqueous amine solvents to solid sorbents, they are often challenged by high parasitic energy consumption during the solvent regeneration step. Thus, a new class of water-lean or anhydrous carbon capture materials such as Ionic Liquids (ILs) and Nanoparticle Organic Hybrid Materials (NOHMs) have been developed. One of the main challenges associated with their development is high viscosity. Thus, a new solvent delivery method via encapsulation has been proposed to provide large interfacial area for CO2 capture for these viscous fluids. This study showed that NOHMs and other nanoscale materials can be successfully encapsulated inside UV-curing polymeric shell which is gas permeable. The CO2 capture rate of the encapsulated solvents were drastically improved compared to bulk fluid. By tuning the fluid flow rates during encapsulated, the thickness of the shell can be controlled and, in some cases, multi core capsules were produced further increasing the interfacial area. This encapsulation technique can be applied to other systems with high viscosity.

Encapsulation of nanoscale hybrid materials for innovative CO2 capture

256th National Meeting (2018)

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