Experimental study on carbon capture characteristics of marine engine exhaust gas by activated potassium carbonate absorbent.

ABSTRACT

Post-combustion carbon capture is a direct and effective way for onboard carbon capture. Therefore, it is important to develop onboard carbon capture absorbent that can both ensure a high absorption rate and reduce the energy consumption of the desorption process. In this paper, a K2CO3 solution was first established using Aspen Plus to simulate CO2 capture from the exhaust gases of a marine dual-fuel engine in diesel mode. The lean and rich CO2 loading results from the simulation were used to guide the selection and optimization of the activators used in the experiment. During the experiment, five amino acid salt activators including SarK, GlyK, ProK, LysK, and AlaK and four organic amine activators including MEA, PZ, AEEA, and TEPA were used. Experiments only considered the activation effect of CO2 loading between lean and rich conditions. The results showed that after adding a small amount of activator, the absorption rate of CO2 by the absorbent was greatly improved, and the activation effect of organic amine activators was stronger than that of amino acid salts. Among the amino acid salts, the SarK-K2CO3 composite solution showed the best performance in both absorption and desorption. Among the amino acid salts and the organic amino activators, SarK-K2CO3 showed the best performance in strengthening the CO2 desorption while PZ-K2CO3 enhanced the CO2 absorption process the most. In the study of the concentration ratio, it was found that when the mass concentration ratio was 11 for SarKK2CO3 and PZK2CO3, the CO2 absorption and desorption processes improved well.