Catalytic CO2 Desorption Study of Tri-Solvent MEA-EAE-DEEA with Five Solid Acid Catalysts

To achieve the CO2 emission control as the urgent task of Carbon Peak and Carbon Neutrality, the CO2 desorption experiments were performed with a new tri-solvent MEA-EAE(2-(ethylamino)ethanol)-DEEA(N, N-diethylethanolamine) with five solid acid catalysts: blended catalysts of γ-Al2O3/H-ZSM-5 = 2:1, H-Beta (Hβ), H-mordenite, HND-8, and HND-580 as H2SO4 replacement. A series of sets of experiments were performed in a typical recirculation process by means of both heating directly at 363 K and temperature programming method within 303~358 K to evaluate the key parameters: average desorption rate (ADR), heat duty (HD), and desorption factors (DF). After analyses, the 0.5 + 2 + 2 mol/L MEA-EAE-DEEA with catalyst HND-580 possessed the best CO2 desorption act at relatively low amine regeneration temperatures with minimized HD and the biggest DF among the other catalysts. Comparing with other tri-solvents + catalysts studied, the order of DF was MEA-BEA-DEEA + HND-8 > MEA-EAE-DEEA + HND-580 ≈ MEA-EAE-DEEA + HND-8 > MEA-EAE-AMP + HND-8. This combination has its own advantage of big cyclic capacity and wider operation region of CO2 loading range of lean and rich amine solution (αlean~αrich), which is applicable in an industrial amine scrubbing process of a pilot plant in carbon capture.