1D Modeling of CO2 Absorption Using K2CO3 in a Hollow Fibre Membrane Contactor

Abstract

Carbon dioxide (CO2) is widely recognized as the main cause of climate change affecting our planet. In recent years, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere has increased significantly due to the intensive combustion of fossil fuels. This study is devoted to the simulation of the 1D case of the CO2 capture process by aqueous Potassium carbonate K2CO3 as a chemical solvent, using a membrane contactor in the counter current case. The system of partial differential equations resulting from the modeling was solved using MATLAB’s PDEPE function. We also carried out a parametric analysis to see the impact of various parameters on the CO2 capture process. Among these parameters, we studied the influence of solvent concentration, gas velocity and liquid velocity. The results show that 13% increase (74–87%) in CO2 capture while the increase of solvent concentration from 20 to 50 (mol/m3), also for gas and liquid velocity from 0.001 to 0.05 and 0.006 to 0.05 (m/s) we have 52% and 3% increase of CO2 capture respectively.