A novel method to recover ammonia loss in ammonia‐based CO2 capture system: ammonia regeneration by vacuum membrane distillation

Abstract Aiming to solve the problem of high ammonia loss during ammonia‐based CO 2 chemical absorption process, an ammonia wash system was recommended to be added after the absorber column. Hence, we need to deal with a lot of wash water. Recently, we proposed a vacuum membrane distillation (VMD) system to regenerate ammonia from ammonia wash water. The stripping gaseous ammonia can be used for producing a high‐concentration ammonia solution for solvent make‐up in the CO 2 capture system, and the wash water after distillation can be reused. In this work, we investigated 0.3 M ammonia solutions on different operation factors such as feed flow rate, feed temperature, pressure in the permeate side, and CO 2 loading. The experimental results show that both temperature and pressure in the permeate side have significant influences on the ammonia stripping process. Increasing feed temperature and reducing pressure in the permeate side will not only improve ammonia removal efficiency, but also enhance total transmembrane flux and overall mass transfer coefficient. The increase of feed flow rate can improve the total transmembrane flux, but will lower the ammonia removal efficiency. The increase of CO 2 loading in the feed ammonia solution will decrease the ammonia removal rate. Furthermore, we investigated a continuous circulation experiment and found that the ammonia removal efficiency largely depended on the removal time. The removal efficiency can be up to 95.6% with a 120 min continuous circulation time. We think this VMD system has the potential to recover ammonia and solve the solvent loss problem. © 2015 Society of Chemical Industry and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd