Reliability Analysis of Electro-Swing Adsorption Carbon Capture Onboard Ships

The maritime sector accounts for approximately three percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, a share expected to increase in the coming decades. To comply with increasingly stringent emission regulations, onboard carbon capture (OCC) technologies are being investigated as a short- to medium-term mitigation option for existing ship fleets. Among these, electro-swing adsorption (ESA) represents a novel post-combustion carbon capture technology that enables reversible CO 2 adsorption and desorption through electrochemical potential changes. This study presents a system-level reliability assessment of an ESA-based carbon capture unit integrated into the exhaust treatment system of a container vessel. Two complementary reliability methods are applied: a bottom-up Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA), to identify critical component failures, and a top-down Fault Tree Analysis (FTA), to quantify failure propagation leading to system shutdown. The FMEA identifies the heater, compressors, and vacuum pumps as the most critical components due to their high failure impact and limited redundancy. The quantitative FTA yields an overall system failure rate of 0.00066 h -1 and a point availability of 99.3 %. The dominant failure pathway is associated with ” process-related failures ”, primarily driven by impurities in the exhaust gas stream. These findings highlight the importance of effective upstream exhaust-gas pre-treatment and stable thermal operation at approximately 120 °C to ensure reliable ESA performance. Overall, ESA-based OCC systems may achieve reliability levels within a similar order of magnitude as established amine-based technologies, although direct comparisons are subject to significant methodological differences. The study provides design guidance to improve robustness and operational availability of electrochemical carbon capture systems in maritime applications.