Post-combustion CO2 capture with a commercial activated carbon: comparison of different regeneration strategies

A commercial activated carbon supplied by Norit, R2030CO2, was evaluated as CO2 adsorbent under conditions relevant to post-combustion CO2 capture (ambient pressure and diluted CO2). It has been demonstrated that this carbon possesses sufficient CO2/N2 selectivity in order to efficiently separate a binary mixture composed of 17 % CO2 in N2. Moreover, this carbon was easily completely regenerated and it did not show capacity decay after ten consecutive cycles. Three different regeneration strategies were compared in a single-bed adsorption unit: temperature swing adsorption (TSA), vacuum swing adsorption (VSA) and a combination of them, vacuum and temperature swing adsorption (VTSA). Through a simple two step TSA cycle, CO2 was concentrated from 17 to 43 % (vol). For the single-bed cycle configurations, the productivity and CO2 recovery followed the sequence: TSA<VSA<VTSA. Values of productivity up to 1.9 mol kg h and a maximum CO2 recovery of 97 % were reached.