Abhoyjit S. Bhown

In silico screening of carbon-capture materials

One of the main bottlenecks to deploying large-scale carbon dioxide capture and storage (CCS) in power plants is the energy required to separate the CO(2) from flue gas. For example, near-term CCS technology applied to coal-fired power plants is projected to reduce the net output of the plant by some 30% and to increase the cost of electricity by 60-80%. Developing capture materials and processes that reduce the parasitic energy imposed by CCS is therefore an important area of research. We have developed a computational approach to rank adsorbents for their performance in CCS. Using this analysis, we have screened hundreds of thousands of zeolite and zeolitic imidazolate framework structures and identified many different structures that have the potential to reduce the parasitic energy of CCS by 30-40% compared with near-term technologies.

Analysis and Status of Post-Combustion Carbon Dioxide Capture Technologies

The Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) undertook a multiyear effort to understand the landscape of postcombustion CO₂ capture technologies globally. In this paper we discuss several central issues facing CO₂ capture involving scale, energy, and overall status of development. We argue that the scale of CO₂ emissions is sufficiently large to place inherent limits on the types of capture processes that could be deployed broadly. We also discuss the minimum energy usage in terms of a parasitic load on a power plant. Finally, we present summary findings of the landscape of capture technologies using an index of technology readiness levels.

Evaluating different classes of porous materials for carbon capture

Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS) is one of the promising ways to significantly reduce the CO2 emission from power plants. In particular, amongst several separation strategies, adsorption by nano-porous materials is regarded as a potential means to efficiently capture CO2 at the place of its origin in a post-combustion process. The search for promising materials in such a process not only requires the screening of a multitude of materials but also the development of an adequate evaluation metric. Several evaluation criteria have been introduced in the literature concentrating on a single adsorption or material property at a time. Parasitic energy is a new approach for material evaluation to address the energy load imposed on a power plant while applying CCS. In this work, we evaluate over 60 different materials with respect to their parasitic energy, including experimentally realized and hypothetical materials such as metal–organic frameworks (MOFs), zeolitic imidazolate frameworks (ZIFs), porous polymer networks (PPNs), and zeolites. The results are compared to other proposed evaluation criteria and performance differences are studied regarding the regeneration modes, (i.e. Pressure-Swing (PSA) and Temperature-Swing Adsorption (TSA)) as well as the flue gas composition.