Course details

  • Study time: 6 hours

  • Target audience: students and professionals with at least bachelor education in sciences or engineering

Course curriculum

  • 1

    General Introduction

    • Welcome by Marleen Rombouts

    • Welcome by Joeri Denayer

    • Meet the teachers

    • Learning objectives

    • Good practices to use this platform

    • How to obtain your course certificate
  • 2

    1. Overview of CO₂ capture strategies

    • Open question: technical solutions

    • Global context of CCUS

    • Overview of CO₂ capture approaches

    • Exercise 1: Difference in CO₂ concentration for the different CO₂ capture approaches

    • Exercise 2: Identify CO₂ capture approach

    • Exercise 3: Capture of CO₂ from small, distributed CO₂ sources

  • 3

    2. General overview of carbon capture technologies

    • Introduction

    • Cryogenic air distillation

    • Cryogenic CO₂ separation

    • Liquid absorption

    • Solid adsorption

    • Chemical looping

    • Membrane processes

    • Exercise: Recognising separation processes

  • 4

    3. Case Study 1: Postcombustion CO₂ capture via liquid absorption

    • Exercise: Estimate the CO₂ emissions

    • Exercise: Estimate the flue gas composition

    • The amine pilot plant

    • Exercise: Estimate the energy consumption

    • Multiple choice

    • Concluding remarks
  • 5

    4. Key-elements of solid adsorption reactors for CO₂ capture: Reactor types and sorbent materials

    • Introduction to solid adsorption

    • Solid adsorption reactor types - Sorbent packings & Flow configurations

    • Exercise: What is the most common reactor configuration for a solid adsorption process?

    • Selection of a CO₂ sorbent material

    • Overview of families of CO₂ sorbent materials

    • Exercise: Match CO₂ sorbents with their typical properties and/or application

    • From sorbent powder to macroscopic sorbent

    • Exercise: Impact of the multi-scale structure of an adsorbent material to the adsorption process

    • Conventional fixed bed reactor with spherical beads

    • Exercise: How could you lower the total pressure drop in a conventional fixed bed reactor with spherical beads?

    • Animation of conventional versus structured fixed bed reactor

    • Characteristics of honeycomb shaped sorbent versus packed bed of sorbent beads

    • Exercise: Characteristic of honeycomb versus packed bed of beads (add explanation)
  • 6

    5. Introduction to Electrification of Adsorption Processes

    • Introduction

    • Comparison of Adsorption Technologies for Carbon Capture

    • Thermal Swing Adsorption in Carbon Capture

    • Why electrification?

    • Exercise on types of electrification methods
  • 7

    6. (Emerging) adsorption technology for carbon capture

    • Introduction to adsorption technology

    • Electrical Swing Adsorption (ESA)

    • Magnetic Induction Heating Swing Adsorption (MISA)

    • Microwave Swing Adsorption (MSA)

    • Exercise on basics: materials

    • Exercise: regeneration
  • 8

    Conclusion

    • Help us to improve this course

    • What did you learn?

    • Thanks to our collaborators

Instructor(s)

Research and Development Engineer

Marleen Rombouts

Marleen is a senior researcher in the Coating and Shaping Technologies team, which is part of the Materials and Chemistry Unit at the Flemish Institute for Technological Research (VITO) in Belgium. The team focuses on the processing and advanced (colloidal) shaping of inorganic powders into hierarchically porous structures by 3D printing, powder granulation and surface functionalization technologies. The products are applied in the area of sustainable chemistry, advanced energy technologies, biomaterials or advanced recycling. Applications include solid sorbents for gas cleaning (e.g. CO₂ capture) and catalysts for CO₂ conversion into added value chemicals or fuels. With a background in materials engineering, Marleen’s interests are to advance innovations and optimize novel process concepts in collaborative projects with industry and/or academia and to develop industrial showcases in the field of hierarchically porous structures for sorption and heterogeneous catalysis.

Professor Bio-engineering Sciences

Joeri Denayer

Joeri Denayer is a full professor at the Department of Chemical Engineering at Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) in Belgium. His research focuses on adsorption separation technology, from fundamental to applied level, process intensification, and CO₂ capture. His expertise and services cover the characterization, design, and synthesis of porous solid materials, and the design and building of processes and lab to pilot scale units for gas, vapor, and liquid streams. Internationally, he regularly shares his expertise as a speaker on conferences and as an active member of multiple scientific networks (International Adsorption Society, American Institute of Chemical Engineers, Dutch Zeolite Association) and he is an editor for the IAS journal ‘Adsorption’.

Professor Chemical Engineering

Tom Van Assche

Professor Van Assche is an adsorption specialist, focusing on experimental and theoretical model related to adsorption thermodynamics, adsorptive carbon capture and process design. He teaches various courses as Unit Operations and Sustainable Chemical Processes. Prof. Van Assche was assisted by PhD researches Jennifer Pham Van and Mathijs Born in creating this module.