Innovative method to prepare a stable emulsion liquid membrane for high CO2 absorption and its performance evaluation for a natural gas feed in a rotating disk contactor

This paper presents an innovative method to prepare a stable emulsion liquid membrane (ELM) for high CO2 absorption in a natural gas feed. This new method achieved high throughput at low power consumption. The ELM prepared using this new method was characterized by determining the effects of the concentration of the ELM constituents, emulsification time, and speed on the emulsion droplet size (EDS) and stability. This was followed by a parametric study of the process parameters for CO2 separation from natural gas in a rotating disk contactor (RDC)-based setup to evaluate the performance of a stable ELM. The results suggest that the retention time of the stable ELM in a RDC increases with increasing amount of absorbed CO2. The results support the fundamental development of the ELM process to achieve a high overall separation efficiency of CO2 removal from natural gas with a relatively small contact time. This is the first parametric study of CO2 absorption from a gas stream in ELM using a RDC as the contracting equipment. The results of the parametric study suggested that the factors of time, TEA concentration and RDC speed have significant effect on the CO2 absorption from natural gas feed. It was identified that 4% TEA in ELM, 30 min operational time and 700 rpm speed of modified RDC system is suitable for maximum CO2 absorption from gas mixture of CO2/CH4. Furthermore, the study suggested that the ELM containing 4% TEA can absorb 5.6 kmol/m3 CO2.