ChemE Professor Badie Morsi's Research Higlighted in "Advances in Engineering"

Originally posted in Advances in Engineering

The journal article, “Development of an innovative process for post-combustion CO₂ capture to produce high-value NaHCO₃ nanomaterials," (doi: 10.1016/j.ijggc.2022.103761) appears here.

Carbon dioxide (CO₂) capture and storage is a critical technology in the fight against climate change. CO₂ is a greenhouse gas that contributes to global warming and climate change, and reducing its emissions is essential to mitigating the impacts of climate change. Nanotechnology, which involves manipulating materials at the nanoscale level, has shown great promise in the field of CO₂ capture. Nanotechnology offers several advantages for CO₂ capture. First, it allows for the development of materials with high surface area and high selectivity for CO₂ adsorption. Second, it allows for the design of materials with tailored properties, such as high thermal stability and resistance to moisture. Third, nanomaterials can be used in a variety of CO₂ capture technologies, including absorption, adsorption, and membrane separation. Examples of nanotechnology being used for CO₂ capture is the development of metal-organic frameworks and carbon nanotubes. While preventive methods promote renewable energies and energy-efficient programs, mitigative methods focus on capturing CO₂ from existing power plants and electricity generation sources, which accounts for about 42% of global CO₂ emissions. Particularly, post-combustion CO₂ capture and sequestration strategies are promising routes for industrialized economies owing to their benefits like high reaction rate, non-corrosive nature and low cost. However, these methods use chemical absorbents, which suffer from various inadequacies.

Importantly, it is possible to obtain valuable products during CO₂ capturing process. In particular, producing sodium bicarbonate (NaHCO₃) nanomaterials during CO₂ capturing using Gly/NaOH solution has drawn significant attention. Due to their high commercial value, the resulting nanomaterials can be sold to offset the cost of the carbon-capturing process. This also presents a novel route for producing sodium bicarinate with a wide range of applications in different fields. In order to produce highly valuable NaHCO₃ nanomaterials, it is imperative to develop innovative CO₂ capture processes.

On this account, Rui Wang, Dr. Husain Ashkanani and Professor Badie Morsi from University of Pittsburgh together with Professor Bingyun Li from West Virginia University developed a novel process for CO₂ capturing from a split flue gas stream emitted from post-combustion coal power plant. The split flue gas stream with a flow rate of 12.43 kg/s contained 0.0023 and 13.33 mol% of SO₂ and CO₂, respectively. The process comprised five main units designed to remove all SO₂ and capture more than 90 mol% of CO₂ in the flue gas stream while producing highly valuable NaHCO₃ nanomaterials. Their work is currently published in the research journal, International Journal of Greenhouse Gas Control [1].

The authors analyzed the mass transfer characteristics, hydraulics and the process performance, levelized costs of the CO₂ capture as well as the capital and operating expenditures to validate the feasibility of the proposed method. The process hydraulics obtained in the SO₂ washing and CO₂ capture units showed no flooding in both the countercurrent packed beds. The results for both the flue gas washing unit and CO₂ absorber depicted greater gas-side mass transfer coefficients than liquid-side mass transfer coefficients. For instance, the hydraulics in the CO₂ capture and SO₂ washing showed a pressure drop of 1 kPa and 12 kPa, respectively. Additionally, the normalized specific wetted packing area and liquid holdup in both units exhibited similar behaviors.

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Read the full article here.