Issue 6, 2020

Dendritic silver self-assembly in molten-carbonate membranes for efficient carbon dioxide capture

Abstract

Membranes for CO2 capture should offer high permeant fluxes to keep membrane surface area small and material requirements low. Ag-supported, dual-phase, molten-carbonate membranes routinely demonstrate the highest CO2 fluxes in this class of membrane. However, using Ag as a support incurs high cost. Here, the non-equilibrium conditions of permeation were exploited to stimulate the self-assembly of a percolating, dendritic network of Ag from the molten carbonate. Multiple membrane support geometries and Ag incorporation methods were employed, demonstrating the generality of the approach, while X-ray micro-computed tomography confirmed that CO2 and O2 permeation stimulated self-assembly. We report the highest flux of Ag-supported molten-salt membranes to date (1.25 ml min−1 cm−2 at 650 °C) and ultrahigh permeability (9.4 × 10−11 mol m−1 s−1 Pa−1), surpassing the permeability requirement for economically-competitive post-combustion CO2 capture, all whilst reducing the membrane-volume-normalised demand for Ag by one order of magnitude.

Graphical abstract: Dendritic silver self-assembly in molten-carbonate membranes for efficient carbon dioxide capture

Supplementary files

Article information

Article type
Paper
Submitted
29 Oct 2019
Accepted
09 Mar 2020
First published
29 Apr 2020
This article is Open Access
Creative Commons BY license

Energy Environ. Sci., 2020,13, 1766-1775

Dendritic silver self-assembly in molten-carbonate membranes for efficient carbon dioxide capture

L. A. McNeil, G. A. Mutch, F. Iacoviello, J. J. Bailey, G. Triantafyllou, D. Neagu, T. S. Miller, E. I. Papaioannou, W. Hu, D. J. L. Brett, P. R. Shearing and I. S. Metcalfe, Energy Environ. Sci., 2020, 13, 1766 DOI: 10.1039/C9EE03497H

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