Electrostatic Separation of Carbon Dioxide by Ionization in Bifurcation Flow

Abstract

Carbon dioxide is one of the major green house gases as well as impurities in process gases used for various manufacturing industries. In the present work, our recently developed ionization separator (Ito et al., Ind. & Eng. Chem. Res., 42, 5617-5621, 2003) was applied to the separation of carbon dioxide from inert gases. As a result, it was found that carbon dioxide can be separated mostly in the form of anion although some fraction of carbon dioxide decomposes by the soft X-ray irradiation. The maximum efficiency of electrostatic separation of carbon dioxide was 14% when helium stream contains 2.4 ppm of carbon dioxide at the applied voltage of 600V and the separation efficiency was decreased with increase in the inlet concentration. The dependency of separation efficiency on the applied voltage was qualitatively explained by the separation model that accounted for the electrical migration, the generation and the neutralization of anions and cations formed from carbon dioxide.