Design and experiment of high-productivity two-stage vacuum pressure swing adsorption process for carbon capturing from dry flue gas

A two-stage vacuum pressure swing adsorption(VPSA)process that coupled kinetically controlled and equilibrium controlled separation process with reflux has been investigated for capturing carbon dioxide from dry flue gas(85%N_(2)/15%CO_(2)).In the first enriching stage,carbon molecular sieve(CMS),which shows kinetic selectivity for CO_(2)/N_(2),is adopted as the adsorbent to remove most N_(2)in feed gas,thereby upgrading CO_(2)and significantly reducing the amount for further refinement.The second stage loads zeolite 13X as adsorbent to purify the CO_(2)-rich flow from the first stage for meeting the requirements of National Energy Technology Laboratory.Series of experiments have been conducted for adsorption isotherms measuring and lab-scale experimental validation as well as analysis.The effect of feed composition on the separation performance of the PSA system was studied experimentally and theoretically here.The optimal results achieved 95.1%purity and 92.9%recovery with a high CO_(2)productivity(1.89 mol CO_(2)·h^(-1)·kg^(-1))and an appropriate energy consumption of 1.07 MJ·(kg CO_(2))^(-1).Further analysis has been carried out by simulation for explicating the temperature,pressure,and concentration distribution at cyclic steady state.