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…