Ever increasing atmospheric CO2 concentrations and global emissions impose unprecedented threats to the world’s ecosystem and endanger industrial human activities in their entirety. The AACCT project took place in the context of the fight against Climate Change and provides a new technology for the direct capture of carbon dioxide (CO2) from the air using an adsorption process in which porous materials act like an air filter. The technology takes advantage of unique, intrinsic micro- and macro-molecular structures of porous materials that were developed within the ERC SUPRAMOL and Science Foundation Ireland funded projects. These porous materials have an extraordinary affinity to CO2 allowing its capture from the atmosphere, are not sensitive to water vapour and are not consumed during the process. The CO2 is recovered at mild conditions using vacuum and heat available in industrial set-ups (i.e. power or cement plants…) or even in IT data centres. To avoid large pressure drops (i.e. frictions when air flows through the materials) at high air flow rates, the materials are contained in an innovative modular radial design (i.e. a thin hollow cylindrical cartridge) which allows to decrease the energy requirement and provides a high level of freedom for future industrial scale-up.
The primary objective of the project was to build a stand-alone prototype and demonstrator model using the radial design prior to industrial scale-up and commercialisation of the technology. It has been used to test the stability of the materials (i.e. 1 litre of porous materials) and study their regeneration. During several months, the prototype successfully performed continuous cyclic capture & release of CO2 from the air while recording data about the capture rate, the temperature and the pressure. The collected data confirmed that the technology can successfully be scaled up while preserving the initial performances of the process. Importantly, during the measurements, no sign of degradation of the materials was observed. Also, the prototype confirmed that the radial design gives rise to low pressure drops in the system and therefore minimise the fan power requirement.
During the course of the project, several improvements have been achieved. Especially, the design of the radial cartridges presents better heat transfer characteristics, increasing the productivity of the technology. The innovative design has been protected through patent filing. Another improvement has been achieved for the porous material production. Indeed, it can can now be achieved using water instead of organics solvents, drastically decreasing the carbon emissions associated with the material production.
The results of the AACCT project have been used to initiate the design an industrial size demonstrator (which will contain ca. 250 litres of material) and discussions with multinational companies which are deeply interest in providing test sites. Importantly, the technology is expected to support the creation of a new company in the very next years.
