New research paper studies CO2 frost formation during cryogenic carbon capture

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The research paper from one of our Flexible Funding 2020 projects has recently been published – “Preliminary study of CO2 frost formation during cryogenic carbon capture using tomography analysis”.

Dr Carolina Font-Palma and team investigated a cryogenic carbon capture method that does not require chemicals, is capable of high CO2 removal levels and delivers a high purity CO2, which could be further used in the food industry or to produce chemicals. The cryogenic process involves very low temperatures (around -100C or below) that cause CO2 to freeze.

Cryogenic carbon capture (CCC) is a potential technological solution to reduce CO2 emissions and achieve the needed environmental targets. CCC provides a relatively compact solution to industries where more mature technologies would have difficulty scaling down economically. However, there is a lack of research on frost formation of CO2 within packed bed systems, despite the influence of the CO2 frost layer on thermal conductivity leading to excessive cooling costs. Understanding the rate of CO2 frost growth and accumulation within a packed bed is critical to the design of the capture column.

Therefore, real-time quantitative imaging becomes increasingly desirable to study the CO2 frost formation during cryogenic carbon capture, but it may be difficult by most of the traditional measurement methods. The study aims to investigate the use of an Electrical Capacitance Tomography (ECT) to monitor the real-time CO2 frost formation in a fixed packed bed.

Read the full paper for more…