Desorption research and energy consumption assessment of a porous liquids impregnated by monoethanolamine (MEA)

Porous liquids (PLs), as new carbon capture materials, have great application potential in gas separation, gas storage, catalysis, etc. Herein, it was reported a new Type 3 porous liquids (T3PLs) based on the rational coupling of MEA-modified porous silica nano-spheres (PSNs) as porous hosts with 2-[2-(dimethylamine) ethoxy]ethanol (DMEE) as the fluid medium. A method was specifically developed to evaluate the regeneration energy of T3PLs. It was found energy consumption followed the order: the sensible energy > solvent evaporation > reaction heat energy for 50 % MEA-PSNs (10 %)/DMEE. Further study revealed that the optimum regeneration temperature of the absorbent was 80 °C and the corresponding regeneration energy was 4.04 GJ/ton CO2, which was much smaller than the regeneration energy of commercial absorbent 5 M MEA (9.54 GJ/ton CO2). The regeneration performance revealed the average absorption rate and the average desorption rate decreasing by only 9.3 % and 11.8 % after nine cycles. All the results indicated the T3PLs in the present work were energy-saving and had potential applications in CO2 capture.