Valuing Metal–Organic Frameworks for Postcombustion Carbon Capture: A Benchmark Study for Evaluating Physical Adsorbents

5 years ago

Valuing Metal–Organic Frameworks for Postcombustion Carbon Capture: A Benchmark Study for Evaluating Physical Adsorbents

Ayalew H. Assen, Arijit Mallick, Hao Jiang, Sk Md Towsif Abtab, Mohamed Eddaoudi, Amandine Cadiau, Youssef Belmabkhout, Jamal Aqil, Prashant M. Bhatt, Karim Adil

The development of practical solutions for the energy-efficient capture of carbon dioxide is of prime importance and continues to attract intensive research interest. Conceivably, the implementation of adsorption-based processes using different cycling modes, e.g., pressure-swing adsorption or temperature-swing adsorption, offers great prospects to address this challenge. Practically, the successful deployment of practical adsorption-based technologies depends on the development of made-to-order adsorbents expressing mutually two compulsory requisites: i) high selectivity/affinity for CO2 and ii) excellent chemical stability in the presence of impurities. This study presents a new comprehensive experimental protocol apposite for assessing the prospects of a given physical adsorbent for carbon capture under flue gas stream conditions. The protocol permits: i) the baseline performance of commercial adsorbents such as zeolite 13X, activated carbon versus liquid amine scrubbing to be ascertained, and ii) a standardized evaluation of the best reported metal–organic framework (MOF) materials for carbon dioxide capture from flue gas to be undertaken. This extensive study corroborates the exceptional CO2 capture performance of the recently isolated second-generation fluorinated MOF material, NbOFFIVE-1-Ni, concomitant with an impressive chemical stability and a low energy for regeneration. Essentially, the NbOFFIVE-1-Ni adsorbent presents the best compromise by satisfying all the required metrics for efficient CO2 scrubbing. The prospects of physical adsorbent for carbon capture under flue gas stream conditions are assessed by a new experimental protocol, which is implemented. This protocol confirms that the NbOFFIVE-1-Ni adsorbent presents the best compromise by satisfying all the required metrics for efficient CO2 scrubbing when compared to the mature aqueous amines, emerging amine-supported materials, reference solid adsorbents, and metal–organic framework materials in the open literature.

Publisher URL: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/resolve/doi

DOI: 10.1002/adma.201702953