Jacob Masiala Ngoy
University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa
Title: Influence of moisture on multi-walled carbon nanotube with polyaspartamide for CO2 capture
Biography
Biography: Jacob Masiala Ngoy
Abstract
Global warming caused by the increase of greenhouse gases (GHG) in the atmosphere constitutes today a threat to life sustainability. Most of the energy throughout the world is generated by fossil fuel power plants which exhaust significant amount of GHG in the atmosphere in the form of carbon dioxide (CO2). CO2 capture and storage (CCS) is being investigated for the reintegration of fossil fuel utilization in view of environment clean up where the renewable energy takes advantage. However, technologies for the separation of CO2 from flue gas require a feat of engineering for efficient achievement. This work provides an advanced adsorption technology through a novel adsorbent, MWNT-PAA, designed from the non-covalent functionalization of multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWNTs) by polyaspartamide (PAA) as product of ethylenediamine (EDA) grafted to polysuccinimide (PSI). The adsorbent MWNT-PAA was demonstrated to be highly water tolerant in the temperature range 25-55℃ with a pressure of 110kpa, where the CO2 adsorption capacity increased with the increase of moisture in the adsorbent. After 10 cycles of adsorption-desorption, the MWNT-PAA showed a stable regenerability with a desorption temperature of 100℃ and 99% recovery. Furthermore, the thermodynamic study of MWNT-PAA through heat flow results confirmed the exothermicity of the adsorption process with a higher heat release of 5600kJ/kg compared to desorption process where a very low heat was absorbed (580kJ/kg) to confirm the endothermicity of the process. Thus, the TSA system could release 5000kJ/kg as heat flow balance. This gives the adsorbent MWNT-PAA a large advantage for the energy efficiency.