Carbon Dioxide Removal From Natural Gas By Using Silica Membrane

• Main Author: Nurul Safiah Bt Mat Dagang, Nurul Safiah
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: Universiti Teknologi Petronas 2010
• Subjects: TP Chemical technology
• Online Access: http://utpedia.utp.edu.my/1324/1/NURUL_SAFIAH_BT_MAT_DAGANG.pdf; http://utpedia.utp.edu.my/1324/
• Institution: Universiti Teknologi Petronas

The community is already paying high attention to the development of technologies especially in the natural gas processing. One of the attentions is on the development of membrane technology in the natural gas separation in order to get high quality of natural gas. Presence of carbon dioxide contributes to bad effect especially on the corrosion of equipments, pipelines and this can affect the overall operations. The focus on this technology is because of several advantages of membranes, such as efficient, simplicity, high selectivity and permeability, low cost requirement, stability under operating condition and easy to control leads to the attention of its development. This project is to synthesize a silica membrane with high performance and high carbon dioxide/methane (CO2/CH4) selectivity and also to study the effect of pressure, inlet flow rate and dip coating duration on the separation performance. The silica membrane was prepared by the deposition of silica sol onto porous alumina support. The experiment started with the preparation of alumina support and percentage of porosity was calculated. The highest percentage porosity calculated was 21.89 % by using 20 drops (1.05 gram) of starch as a binder. Then, alumina support was dipped in the silica solution. In dip coating method, the times for dipping were varied for 1.25, 2.25 and 3.25 hours and permeability test was conducted. From the calculation, flux increases when the inlet flow rate and inlet pressure were increased. The highest flux was 1.911 cm3[STP]/cm2.s at 3.5 bar for 50.00 cm3/s inlet flow rate. However, flux decreases as the dip coating hour increased (also when the silica thickness increases) and flux for carbon dioxide (CO2) was higher compared to methane (CH4). The highest permeability was for carbon dioxide (CO2) with 1.009660 cm3[STP].cm/cm2.bar.s at inlet pressure 1.5 bar for 50.00 cm3/s inlet flow rate at 3.25 hours dip coating duration. The separation factor was the highest at 1.5 bar for 50.00 cm3/s inlet flow rate at 3.25 hours dip coating with 1.4212 CO2/CH4 separation factor.