技術情報とプレゼンテーション

A thorough study on the adsorption behaviour of carbon dioxide (CO₂) on silica aerogel is critical for CO₂ sequestration and recovery. Although CO₂ sorption focuses mainly on the lab scale setup, research on the larger bulk counterparts, which is used at industry central facility is necessary in real world application. However, unlike the lab scale test bench, the pilot-scale design and experimentation of large CO₂ sorption column filled with silica aerogel material for evaluation of its multiphysics performance is cumbersome, expensive and practically difficult. A convenient approach is therefore to predict such bulk column’s performance using a numerical model that couples heat and mass transfer with the adsorption kinetics. 

Here, using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) approach, we studied the performance of the silica aerogel material in real-world system. For CFD studies, COMSOL Multiphysics® is used as a platform to implement the proposed model. Langmuir model is adapted to model CO₂ adsorption isotherm. The base model is validated with the experimental data obtained from the activated carbon and MOF-5 test bench data. The validated model is further extended to study the absorption behvaiour for silica aerogel. The effect of different parameters like particle size, porosity, CO₂ mass flow rate, packing density and thermal conductivity on the adsorption capacity during CO₂ charging and discharging cycles were investigated.