Experimental and kinetics investigations of low-concentration CO2 adsorption on several amine-functionalized adsorbents

The rapid cleanup of endogenous CO2 has become a necessity in environmental control and life support systems (ECLSSs), to ensure crew safety and long-term task execution. The extensively used non-regenerable LiOH and soda lime adsorbents, although exhibit high CO2 storage capacities and fast kinetics, can hardly fulfill the demands of reduced launch weight and storage volume in the space- and load-limited ECLSSs. New CO2 adsorbents with desirable attributes including high CO2 uptakes, good selectivity, facile regeneration, fast adsorption and desorption kinetics, and good multicycle stability are urgently needed. We developed amine-functionalized adsorbents by loading tetraethylenepentamine (TEPA) on mesoporous supports of activated carbon (AC), aluminum oxide (AO) and silica gel (SG). The adsorbents were characterized by N2 adsorption-desorption, thermogravimetric analysis (TGA), Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR), and scanning electron microscope (SEM) to study their microstructural properties. CO2 adsorption capacities and kinetic performance of the adsorbents with different supports and various amine loadings (10–50 wt%) were evaluated in 2%CO2 at 20 °C. The effects of support and amine loading on the structure-performance relationships of the adsorbents were demonstrated. The TEPA-SG-20 adsorbent (20 wt% TEPA loaded on silica gel support) exhibits the highest CO2 adsorption capacity of 1.90 mmol CO2/g and the maximum amine efficiency of 0.48 mmol CO2/mmol N. TEPA-SG-20 also exhibits fast CO2 adsorption kinetics, and the Avrami fractional order kinetic model provides a satisfactory correlation of the experimental CO2 uptakes. Furthermore, the TEPA-SG-20 adsorbent can be efficiently regenerated at 110 °C with a great regeneration efficacy of 97%. The desired adsorbent also exhibits good working stability with a low loss-in-capacity of 4.32% in 10 consecutive cycles. The good CO2 adsorption performance of TEPA-SG-20 is associated with the excellent microstructural properties such as high surface area, great pore volume and uniform dispersion of amine species. Overall, the desired TEPA-SG-20 adsorbent shows promise for low-concentration CO2 removal in ECLSSs.