Immobilization of Calcium Oxide Absorbent on a Fibrous Alumina Mat for High Temperature Carbon Dioixde Capture

Anthropogenic carbon dioxide emission from its sources must be reduced to decrease the threat of global warming. Calcium oxide is considered as an effective carbon dioxide absorbent in biomass or coal gasification process as well as conventional power plants. It reacts with carbon dioxide to form calcium carbonate which can be decomposed into the original oxide and carbon dioxide at high temperature by calcination. In order to make this method practical for the carbon dioxide capture and sequestration, the performance of the calcium oxide absorbent must be maintained over a large number of carbonation/calcination cycles. For this reason, loss in the surface area of the absorbent due to pore plugging and sintering of particles in cyclic operation must be avoided. To prevent or minimize this problem, a simple and effective procedure for immobilization of calcium oxide on a fibrous alumina mat was developed in this study. The prepared samples were observed by SEM and the cyclic performance of the calcium oxide absorbent was evaluated by TGA experiments and compared to the previous studies in literature. 75% and 62% maximum carbonation conversions of the prepared absorbents with 23 wt % and 55 wt % calcium oxide content were achieved respectively and remained stable even after ten cycles whereas conversion in the literature data dropped steeply with the number of cycles.