United Technologies Aerospace Systems has drawn on over 30 years of experience with solid amine-based CO2 removal systems to develop a thermally desorbed system for the collection and concentration of CO2. Our approach incorporates a passive means of water vapor recovery, using desiccant materials in thermally linked sorbent beds, upstream of the solid amine CO2 sorbent beds, to achieve an approximate 90% nominal water vapor recovery with minimal power input. The residual water vapor and CO2 are subsequently removed by SA9T amine sorbent in a second set of sorbent beds. The dry, CO2 free effluent is then used to regenerate the desiccant beds using a simple sweep gas desorption. When the amine beds are loaded with CO2 to their design capacity, they are isolated, evacuated and heated to approximately 60°C, while simultaneously pumping the evolved CO2 and residual water vapor. The residual water vapor is removed from the CO2 product stream via sorbent beds, or a condensing heat exchanger, depending on the subsequent downstream processing requirements of the CO2. The concentrated CO2 can then be discharged overboard or sent to a CO2 reduction system such as Sabatier. A significant advantage to utilizing solid amines is that they are relatively insensitive to incoming water vapor and therefore large desiccant beds are not required upstream of the CO2 sorbent beds. Additionally, the passive nature of the water recovery and moderate regeneration temperature of the amine, may result in reduced power requirements compared to the state of the art CO2 removal systems. This paper presents results of our testing of our TRL 4 system, and current status of a TRL 5 design.
展开▼
