CO2 absorption by ionic liquids

Abstract

The substitution of conventional organic solvents by room temperature ionic liquids (RTIL) has shown potential applications in the capture and storage of CO2. This is a consequence of their high solvent capacity, high chemical and thermal stability, and their negligible vapour pressure, that minimizes evaporation losses. The current increasing of scientific papers and patents related to ionic liquids indicates the possibility of its applications in industrial processes. From the standpoint of fundamental science, the application of these liquids depends on the physico-chemical parameters that govern the processes involved in the absorption of the gas. This project aims at the systematic study of different ionic liquids (IL) and their mixtures with amines as CO2 absorbers, in order to understand the factors that govern their interactions, and thus optimize properties, helping to develop feasible methodologies of gas capture. The thermodynamic parameters can be estimated from solubility measurements as a function of pressure and temperature. The correlation between the micro and macroscopic parameters should be performed by the comparison of solubility and transport measurements (viscosity, density and diffusion coefficients) with spectroscopic data (Raman, infrared and NMR), supported by computational methods based on density functional theory (DFT) and molecular dynamics (MD). (AU)