Absorption of Greenhouse Gases in Liquids

On 23 November 2015 Sayee Praseed Balaji defended his thesis 'Absorption of Greenhous Gases in Liquids'  (download) successfull at the TU Delft.

Post-combustion CO2 capture processes mainly use chemical solvents like monoethanolamine (MEA) to capture CO2 from flue gas streams. The regeneration of CO2 from the rich solvents is an energy intensive process which decreases the overall efficiency. Other issues like solvent volatility/corrosiveness, toxicity, and solvent costs are critical for choosing the best solvent for post-combustion capture.

There is a need for designing new solvents which are less energy intensive, less toxic and corrosive than the ones existing in the industry. Solvent design is extremely challenging, since there are potentially millions of molecules that can be used as a solvent for post-combustion CO2 capture and to find the best solvent is extremely difficult from an experimental point of view. In this thesis, we develop advanced techniques and methods that can potentially be used to screen large number of solvent molecules and to potentially select the most promising ones. Existing molecular methods are insufficient to efficiently describe the chemisorption and diffusion of CO2 in liquid solvents. We have developed new methods to study the different thermodynamic processes taking place between the CO2 and solvent molecules.