Application of Amine-functionalized Cellulose Foam for CO2 Capture and Storage in Brewery Industry

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Zhu, Yejun ; Gensel, Julia ; Helmlinger, Lars ; Neumeyer, Thomas ; Thäter, Stefan ; Strube, Franziska ; Bauer, Christoph ; Rosemann, Bernd ; Altstädt, Volker:
Application of Amine-functionalized Cellulose Foam for CO2 Capture and Storage in Brewery Industry.
In: INRA (ed.): 4th International Conference on Biobased Materials and Composites : Book of Abstracts. - Nantes , 2017 . - p. 77

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Excess CO2 emission leads to the global warming and worldwide impact. Besides direct fossil fuel combustion, industrial production processes also release large amounts of CO2. In brewery Industry, the fermentation during the brewing process generates CO2 each year. Additionally CO2 is used as flushing and pressurization gas, which has to be purchased and is afterwards released to environment directly. As a result, enormous amounts of CO2 are wasted and are released into the air. In this study, the application of amine functionalized cellulose will be investigated for CO2 capture and storage in fermentation processes and regeneration for other CO2 assisted processes. In this way, the CO2 emission can be significantly reduced in brewery industry.
Freeze-dry of amine-functionalized nano-fibrillated cellulose (NFC) is widely reported in most published literatures for CO2 capture and storage. However, there are two challenging disadvantages which highly limit its further application. First, the additional cost to produce NFC which is reported to be nearly 2 €/g in some published data. Second, long production time of freeze-dry process significantly increases the cost. NFC solutions contains more than 90%wt water before freeze-dry. Therefore, the energy consumption could be evaluated as similar to industrial freeze dried fruit which is nearly 40 €/kg.
In this study, a cheaper and faster fabrication process of amine-functionalized cellulose foam will be investigated. Micro cellulose fiber is selected as supporting material. Polyethyleneimine (PEI) will be used to functionalize the surface. Instead of freeze-dry, a violent hot press process at 140 °C will be applied to produce cellulose foam absorbent. Due to a rapid temperature increase in this process, the steam explosion inside the material will generate porous structure. By direct impregnation of PEI, amine-functionalized cellulose foam can be achieved. Based on current lab-scale investigations, this paper provides an economic method to produce amine-functionalized cellulose porous adsorbent for CO2 capture and storage. Based on the lab scale production, the fabrication cost is about 5 €/kg, considering the major energy is from electricity consumption for drying process.
In order to investigate the CO2 adsorption capacity, a novel laboratory test platform for CO2 adsorption and desorption using temperature swing analysis (TSA) is built up. The CO2 adsorption capacity and dynamics can be evaluated by measuring the CO2 concentration before and after the adsorption. The influence of CO2 concentrations and relative humidity on the adsorption will be investigated as well.