Direct-Air Carbon Capture

Climate Change is a pressing issue with multiple avenues of approach. Building on the work of the faculty group, a prototype system was modeled, built, and tested to obtain practical results for the electrical energy consumption and deposited carbon dioxide mass characteristics of a bench scale system. These characteristics are then compared to the current U.S. Dept. of Energy carbon capture cost targets to gauge the feasibility of the approach and build a robust understanding of the areas of improvement. While phase separation is a proven methodology, it has generally not seen use in direct air capture due to the inherently low mass fraction feed streams. However, by preconcentrating the carbon dioxide, we can take advantage of the efficiency of phase separation at higher concentration regimes, and recover our work via a heat exchanger. This allows us to achieve theoretical performance of around 33 GJ/tonne of carbon dioxide