Publications Details

Increasing CO₂ Capture Rate in Liquid-Solvent Direct-Air Carbon Capture via Additive Manufacturing

Rodgers, Theron M.; Domino, Stefan P.; Grillet, Anne M.; Mcmaster, Anthony M.; Heiden, Michael J.

Carbon capture is essential to meeting climate change mitigation goals. One approach currently being commercialized utilizes liquid-based solvents to capture CO₂ directly from the atmosphere but is limited by slow absorption of CO₂ into the liquid. Improved air/solvent liquid mixing increases CO₂ absorption rate, and this increased CO₂ absorption efficiency allows for smaller carbon capture systems with lower capital costs and better economic viability. In this project, we study the use of passive micromixers fabricated by metal additive manufacturing. The micromixer’s small-scale surface geometric features perturb and mix the liquid film to enhance mass transfer and CO₂ absorption. In this project, we evaluated this hypothesis through computational and experimental studies. Computational investigations focused on developing capabilities to simulate thin film (~ 100μm) fluid flow on rough surfaces. Such thin films are in a surface-tension dominated regime and simulations in this regime are prone to instabilities. Improvements to the Nalu code completed in this project resulted in a 10x timestep stability improvement for these problems.