200 College St.
Abstract
In the last 20 years, significant efforts have been invested in developing adsorption processes for CO2 capture. The explosion in adsorbent synthesis and molecular simulations has generated hundreds of thousands of (hypothetical & real) adsorbents, e.g., Zeolites, Metal-Organic Frameworks (MOFs). This excitement has led to an implicit assumption that the key bottleneck in developing large-scale adsorption processes is discovering the right adsorbent. However, the practical reality is quite different. Very few successful examples have moved from the lab(or computer) to an industrial scale. In this talk, we will highlight some modelling and experimental tools we have been developing to enable screening and discovery of CO2 capture sorbents. On the modelling side, we will discuss simulation tools that enable process-informed screening of sorbents. On the experimental side, a major challenge for both process upscaling and molecular modelling is the lack of multi-component adsorption equilibria, particularly CO2-N2, CO2-water vapour and CO2-steam. We will discuss our efforts in developing experimental techniques to measure such data on small samples and highlight recent results showing multicomponent adsorption data on various CO2 capture MOFs. We will highlight our experience measuring multi-component data on Calgary framework-20 (CALF-20), perhaps the first MOF to be scaled up for industrial CO2 capture., and other CO2 capture MOFs.
Biography
Arvind Rajendran is a professor of Chemical Engineering at the University of Alberta. He received his PhD from ETH Zurich and started his academic career at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, before moving to the University of Alberta in 2012. He has co-authored over 90 papers and (co-) advised 50+ highly qualified personnel. His research group focuses on adsorptive gas separations with applications in CO2 capture, direct air capture, oxygen purification and helium separation. Between 2016 and 2020, he served as an associate editor of the Canadian Journal of Chemical Engineering and as an area editor of Adsorption- the journal of the International Adsorption Society.