Performance study of an electrified temperature vacuum swing adsorption cycle for post combustion carbon capture

The performance of a fully electrified temperature vacuum swing adsorption (E-TVSA) carbon capture process is investigated and compared with the performance of a VSA cycle as the reference case. A five-step process including (I) adsorption, (II) co-current heating, (III) counter-current evacuation, (IV) counter-current pressurizing, and (V) co-current closed loop cooling steps was devised and simulated. The adsorption time, electric heating power, and evacuation pressure were chosen as the independent variables for evaluating their impact on key performing indicators (KPI) of purity, recovery, productivity and energy consumption. In total 2717 cases were simulated to the cyclic steady state condition to provide 44 contours of the KPIs. From these contours it can be concluded that in E-TVSA carbon capture using 13X zeolite, a temperature rise of almost 50 degrees is necessary during the heating step, and the evacuation step should be continued to reach a pressure between 2.5 and 3 kPa. Under these conditions, a recovery and purity of more than 98 % were achieved with a production rate above 1.1 kg CO₂/kg _ads day and a specific energy consumption of 1.74 MJ/kg CO₂ (0.61 MJ/kg CO₂ for evacuation and 1.13 MJ/kg CO₂ for heating). When comparing E-TVSA and VSA, it is noteworthy that the production rate and specific energy consumption of E-TVSA are in the same order as that of VSA. However, E-TVSA surpasses VSA in terms of purity and recovery rates. Further analysis of the transformation efficiency from electricity to heat revealed the transformation efficiency must be at least 50 % to keep the energy consumption below 3 MJ/kg CO₂.