Gas-liquid membrane contactor (GLMC) uses hydrophobic porous membrane to separate gaseous feed and liquid absorbent is one of the cost-effective post-combustion carbon capture technologies due to its excellent selectivity and lower energy requirement. Unfortunately, GLMC suffers from membrane wetting, toxic amine usage and energy- intensive solvent regeneration process. Greener solvents, such as carbonate salts, have been used in place of amines to capture CO2 in GLMC. However, the slower CO2 absorption rate of these solvents is not able to compete with the current amine-based absorbent.

Immobilizing biocatalyst on the membrane surface in GLMC could potentially improve the CO2 capture performance of these green solvents. In this work, we compared the CO2 capture performance of cationic and anionic biopolymer coated on top of porous hydrophobic support. The type of porous hydrophobic support, polyelectrolyte coating concentration, membrane coating method, immobilization parameters and process conditions were evaluated. The works showed that the coating thickness, the type of polyelectrolytes coating and the type of porous hydrophobic support greatly influenced the CO2 capture performance. The immobilized biocatalyst onto anionic polyelectrolytes coating was able to improve the overall mass transfer coefficient (Koverall) compared to the cationic polyelectrolytes coating. In summary, anionic polyelectrolyte coating might be more suitable to be implemented as a biocatalyst immobilization platform in thin-film composite biocataltytic GLMC for CO2 capture applications.

Speaker: Yusak Hartanto

Yusak completed his PhD in Chemical Engineering at the University of Adelaide in 2016 with a thesis on desalination process. He then did a first postdoc at KU Leuven on forward osmosis and organic solvent nanofiltration. Since March 2020, he joined IMAP as a postdoc researcher to work on biocatalytic membranes for CO2 capture. CO2 capture is an important topic in today's world, don't miss your chance to hear from a young speaker who is undoubtedly at the forefront of this field.