Methodology for screening adsorbents for CO₂ capture

As is increasingly recognised world wide, global warming is mainly caused by emission of greenhouse gases (mostly CO₂) from the burning of fossil fuels. Different adsorbent screening approaches were applied to CO₂ capture using hypothetical adsorbents, NaX, NaY, and Activated Carbon. Isothermal approaches were not suitable for the screening of adsorbents for CO₂ capture because of the great amount of heat of adsorption for CO₂. A new index, Capture Figure of Merit, is a better assessment tool for developing adsorbents. It could be readily converted to CO₂ capture costs. Heat of adsorption played a very important role in cyclic adsorption process. This is an abstract of a paper presented at the 2007 AIChE Annual Meeting (Salt Lake City, UT 11/4-9/2007).