Mixture of MEA/2-MAE for Effective CO2 Capture from Flue Gas Stream

Abstract

The climate change and global warming are the main environmental concerns because of CO₂ emission into the atmosphere. The main sources of CO₂ is from power plants in the form of flue gas. Recently, the effective technology to capture CO₂ is chemical absorption by using aqueous amine solutions. The commonly used amine solution is monoethanolamine (MEA). It has disadvantages like low capacity and high energy consumption. 2-methylaminoethanol (2-MAE) as a new solvent has been formulated to improve the performance of CO₂ mitigation but the cost of this chemical is higher. The two amines are mixed together to obtain higher performance and to compensate the drawbacks of each solvents. The objective of this research is to measure the solubility of CO₂ in a mixed solvent with 20 : 10 wt% of MEA and 2-MAE for CO₂ capture from the flue gas stream at the temperature of 313.15 K and 353.15 K and CO₂ partial pressures ranging from 5 to 100 kPa. The experimental results are compared with that of single solution of MEA and 2-MAE at the same conditions. From the results, it is reported that in term of cyclic capacity, the amine mixture provides a better performance, which is higher than that of MEA ranging from 2.35 % to 61.90 % but lower than that of 2- MAE from 8.76 % to 43.45 %. The rate of CO₂ loading of mixed solution is relatively close to that of MEA but lower than that of 2-MAE. Therefore, in the future, the mixed solvent may be used as an alternative solution for CO₂ capture instead of using single amine.