Kinetics study of carbon dioxide on activated carbon

• Main Author: Chua, Chang Zhen
• Other Authors: Anutosh Chakraborty
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2015
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Mechanical engineering
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/63656
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

There is a huge increases in greenhouse gases and demand for cleaner energy to reduce these greenhouse gases have been important for many industrial sector, studies need to be carried out to determine possible solution for the reduction of these gases. In this report, physical gas adsorption between carbon dioxide and activated charcoal are studied to determine its experimental fit with various isotherm and kinetics models. The study of gas adsorption on activated charcoal were divided into two section, the adsorption at equilibrium and the adsorption kinetics. Material characterization properties such as pore sizes distribution were analyze by Scanning Electron Microscope(SEM) for different types of activated carbon used in this report to determine the adsorption capacity. The characterization results will be discussed in this report. Subsequently, adsorption experiment through volumetric apparatus were used for the understanding of adsorbent-adsorbate interaction. The experiment were conducted at temperature of 288, 298, 308 and 328K, with different pressure of up to 10 bars, to determine the equilibrium uptakes using the ideal gas law. With the experimental data obtained, isotherm fitting were modelled with suitable adsorption isotherm models such as Langmuir, Toth and CS.isotherm to identify the suitable isotherm model to the experimental data. The experimental results shows that temperature increases with increasing pressure but uptakes of activated carbon decreases with increase temperature. Suitable types of activated charcoal for Carbon dioxide adsorption can also be determine in this project. The adsorption kinetics of gas is widely used to design and model gas purification, adsorption chillers and energy storage systems. Here a constant volume variable pressure system is employed to measure the isotherms and kinetics simultaneously. The experimentally measured CO2 uptake data are fitted pseudo model. These data are unavailable in the literature. The Wolfram programming were introduced to ease the calculation of isotherm and kinetic data as it provides the isotherm and kinetic curve fitting to determine the model that are suitable for this project. The activated charcoal proves to be a possible solution for CO2 adsorption adsorbate as it is effective because of the good affinity which result in high adsorption uptake. Therefore, activated charcoal can to be an alternative way to capture greenhouse gases such as CO2. Activated charcoal are not suitable for the capture of methane gas (CH4).