Enhancing performance of ceramic membrane in CO2 membrane absorption: Single-to multi-channel

Membrane absorption technology has received high attention for CO2 capture, but the brittleness of ceramic membranes limits its miniaturization. Here, founding that ceramic membrane with multi-channel geometry can not only have high specific surface area but also maintain high mechanical strength with small size. In this work, a four-channel ceramic membrane was used to test and compare performance with several single-channel membranes. This four-channel membrane had highest CO2 absorption flux of 4.83 mol m−3 s−1 and KOG of 1.26 mm s−1 among them. Then membrane phase resistance and its contribution to overall mass transfer resistance were analyzed to evaluate the impact of the membrane thickness or geometry. Owing to the undetermined thickness of multi-channel membrane, the absorption performance equivalent thickness was obtained through the simulation to be 0.23 mm using 2 M MEA. Moreover, a preliminary geometric design was attempted and CO2 absorption performances of different multi-channel membranes were compared based on above model.