Experimental determination of monoethanolamine protonation constant and its temperature dependency

Abstract

Carbon dioxide as one of the major contributors to the global warming problem is produced in large quantities by many important industries and its emission seems to rise from year to year. Aminebased absorption is one of the methods to capture CO2 from its sources. As a reactive system, mass transfer and chemical reaction take place simultaneously. In a vapor-liquid equilibrium model for the CO2-amine-water system, some parameters such as mass transfer coefficients and chemical equilibrium constants need to be known. However, some parameters could be determined experimentally and the rests could be regressed from the model. The protonation constant (pKa), as one of the model parameters, could then be measured experimentally. The purpose of this study is to measure the pKa of monoethanolamine (MEA) at a range of temperatures from 303 to 330K by a potentiometric titration method. The experimental data obtained were in a good agreement with the literature data. The pKa data from this work together with those from the literature were then correlated in an empirical correlation to be used for future research.