Computational Fluid Dynamics Simulation of Carbon Dioxide Separation From Flue Gas by Natural Polymer Membrane

Today, it is known that the emission of carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas is one of the most important causes of global warming. Fossil power plants are known as one of the major producers of carbon dioxide. Due to this, the separation of carbon dioxide from the gases that are released into the atmosphere by the chimney of fossil power plants seems to be necessary as an effective method to control the emission of this gas. In the current project, the separation of carbon dioxide from flue gas using natural chitosan membrane is presented. At first, the mathematical model was used to separate carbon dioxide using the module of hollow fibers; In such a way that the flow of gas inside the shell and inert gas (Argon) in the tube are in an unequal way to minimize the partial pressure of carbon dioxide. The above process as well as the effect of changes in different operating conditions on the process were simulated based on computational fluid dynamics with Comsol 6.0 software. The simulation results show that the carbon dioxide/nitrogen selectivity is 15-5 and the permeability is 1-26 Barrer. Increasing the temperature and pressure of the inlet gas has a positive effect on the separation efficiency; while the input percentage of carbon dioxide has no significant effect and its effect can be ignored.