Carbon dioxide adsorption on polyacrylamide-impregnated silica gel and breakthrough modeling

Polyacrylamide-impregnated silica gel was prepared to capture CO2 from flue gas. The polymerization of acrylamide was carried out in AN solvent using AIBN as initiator and EGDMA as crosslinker. The adsorbents were characterized by N2 adsorption, FTIR analysis, SEM analysis, and thermal gravimetric analysis. The results showed that the polymer was not only occupying the porosity of the silica, but necessarily surrounding silica particles, and the amide groups was successfully loaded on the support silica. The impregnated silica displayed good thermal-stability at 250 °C. The CO2 adsorption isotherms were measured to examine CO2 adsorption on adsorbents, and the results showed that the capacity was increased significantly after modification. The CO2 isosteric adsorption heats calculated from the isotherms showed that the adsorption interaction of CO2 with the functionalized material may be mainly an intermolecular force or hydrogen bond. Fixed-bed breakthrough model of CO2 adsorption on functionalized silica was successfully developed to describe the breakthrough curves under different adsorption temperature, CO2 concentration, and gas flow rate. The mass transfer coefficients of CO2 were calculated from the breakthrough model, the results showed that adsorption rate could be promoted by increasing temperature, flow rate and CO2 concentration, among which the effect of gas flow rate is the most obvious.