Carbon dioxide capture in sodium carbonate solution: Mass transfer kinetics and DTAC surfactant enhancement mechanism

• The concentration of the solvent has the greatest influence on the mass transfer kinetics. • The pseudo first-order kinetics model cannot be satisfied in 5 wt% of Na 2 CO 3 solutions. • The barrier and Marangoni effect happened with the addition of surfactants. • CO 2 removal efficiency increased to over 95 % with the addition of surfactants. Sodium carbonate solvent absorbent has been widely studied for CO 2 reduction to deal with global warming because of its green, low cost, and non-corrosive advantages. However, in the application of sodium carbonate as an absorbent for CO 2 capture, there is no unified cognition of the mass transfer process, which leads to the lack of guidance for the industrial large-scale process. Moreover, the mechanism of mass transfer enhancement of surfactants, which can effectively improve the mass transfer performance, has not been effectively explored in the literature. Based on this, this paper firstly adopts the molecular dynamics method to analyze the solution characteristics after surfactant addition and optimize the surfactant. Subsequently, a classical dissolved oxygen test method was used to measure the gas-liquid mass transfer coefficient for CO 2 absorption into sodium carbonate solution. And based on this mass transfer coefficient measurement method, the mass transfer process of sodium carbonate solution with surfactant was analyzed. The results showed that the sodium carbonate solution with 5 wt% concentration and 10 wt% concentration at 30 °C did not satisfy the pseudo first-order fast chemical reaction kinetics assumption. To improve CO 2 absorption mass transfer rate, dodecyl trimethyl ammonium chloride (DTAC) surfactant was introduced, which was improved by 119 % compared with non-enhanced solvent at 5 wt% concentration solution, and the assumption of pseudo first order fast chemical reaction was satisfied. After the introduction of surfactant, the barrier effect decreased the liquid phase mass transfer coefficient, but the Marangoni effect happened in the 5 wt% concentration of sodium carbonate solution, which enhanced the liquid-phase mass-transfer coefficient. This finding reveals the mechanism of mass transfer promotion of sodium carbonate by the surfactant DTAC, which is of great engineering significance for the application in the field of decarbonization after the introduction of surfactant.