Water as Energy Storage Medium for CO2 Adsorption

A comprehensive 3-D transient heat and mass transfer analysis has been performed to study the adsorption characteristics of carbon dioxide onto highly microporous activated carbon (Maxsorb III). The current study is carried out in order to optimize the number of reactors for maximum CO2 uptake, subjected to natural convection environment. All the coupled governing equations are solved using COMSOL Multiphysics. Simulations have been carried out by taking an ambient fluid temperature of 300 K. Number of reactors are varied from 1 to 20, placed vertically in a water tank in order to enhance CO2 adsorption capacity. The configuration with 20 reactors showed a maximum uptake of 18.78 kg of CO2 for 20 kg of the adsorbent. This corresponds to 9 % to 44 % increase in CO2 uptake with respect to other reactor configurations. The said study also highlights the improvements in CO2 uptake compared to respective adiabatic cases, which justifies the usefulness of the configurations considered.