Vacuum swing adsorption process for post-combustion carbon capture with 3D printed sorbents: Quantifying the improvement in productivity and specific energy over a packed bed system through process simulation and optimization

This fully computational work is dedicated to the simulation and optimization of a 6-step vacuum swing adsorption (VSA) process to study the performance of a 3D printed silica sorbent grafted with amino silane. The performance of the 3D printed sorbent was compared with a representative packed bed. Rigorous optimization showed that that it was possible to achieve 2.35 times improvement in productivity with a VSA process containing a 3D printed sorbent than the one using pellets. The minimum specific energy values were found to 1.06 and 1.19 MJ/kg CO2 captured for the 3D printed sorbent and the packed bed respectively.