Editorial: Adsorption-enhanced reactions design, engineering and optimization
Jurriaan Boon
Isabel Martínez
Sergio Rojas
Miguel Angel Soria- 1TNO Sustainable Technologies for Industrial Processes, Petten, Netherlands
- 2Environmental Research Group, Instituto de Carboquímica (Spanish National Research Council, ICB-CSIC), Zaragoza, Spain
- 3Grupo de Energía y Química Sostenibles, Instituto de Catálisis y Petroleoquímica CSIC, Madrid, Spain
- 4LEPABE–Laboratory for Process Engineering, Environment, Biotechnology and Energy, ALiCE–Associate Laboratory in Chemical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, University of Porto, Porto, Portugal
Editorial on the Research Topic
Adsorption-enhanced reactions design, engineering and optimization
In adsorption-enhanced reactions, a reaction product is selectively separated from the reaction atmosphere by means of an adsorption process. For equilibrium-limited reactions, the separation of one of the reaction products increases the conversion and selectivity by shifting the equilibrium according to Le Chatelier’s principle. Moreover, it may help in preserving catalyst activity by removing an inhibiting reaction product. Recently, a wide range of exciting new scientific developments in this field have been spurred by the energy transition (Boon, 2023). These developments range from pre-combustion CO2 capture (Martinez et al., 2019; Soria et al., 2019; Martínez et al., 2022; Capa et al., 2023; Wang and Li, 2023; Malsegna et al., 2024) to CO2 valorisation (van Kampen et al.; Gómez et al., 2022; Jo et al., 2022; Singh et al., 2022; Peinado et al., 2024), and find applications in biomass utilisation, methanol economy and ammonia synthesis. Novel reactor concepts and hybrid materials (with adsorption and catalytic properties) have been developed, including concepts utilising membranes and adsorbents. Reactors are increasingly being tested and scaled up in technology readiness. Adsorption-enhanced reactions are by nature complex systems to design, engineer and optimise: a balance is required among the functional materials and the reactor configuration. In addition to conventional features such as catalyst activity and selectivity and heat and mass transfer phenomena, the performance of an adsorption-enhanced process is ultimately determined by kinetics, adsorbent capacity and selectivity, cyclic working capacity and regeneration conditions used. Catalysts for adsorption-enhanced processes generally work in conditions that are very different from conventional conditions. Heat and mass transfer limitations might lead to performance degradation or slip. Adsorbent capacity directly impacts the required regeneration frequency and achievable working capacity, whereas co-adsorption of reactants or of several reaction products will lead to compromising of the system performance.
As a pre-combustion CO2 capture technique, sorption-enhanced water-gas shift (SEWGS) has seen important developments recently (Sebastiani et al., 2022; Zecca et al., 2023; Monteiro et al., 2024). In terms of cycle design, simulations have been performed by Stadler et al. using a complex hybrid system scale model for a relatively low-temperature (250 °C) pilot plant reactor consisting of six individually accessible reaction chambers. A serial process configuration of reaction chambers was explored, indicating a significant increase in sorbent working capacity. Interestingly, the use of a novel modelling approach using a state machine (Stadler et al., 2022b), without predefined switching times allowed for further optimisation of the SEWGS cycle. In terms of the SEWGS CO2 adsorbent, Xin et al. have investigated the long-term stability of a commercial potassium-promoted hydrotalcite-based adsorbent (KMG30) over many repetitive cycles under various operating conditions. Exposure to repetitive cycles of CO2/N2 (without H2O) led to aggregation of K2CO3 from the adsorbent while exposure to repetitive cycles of H2O/N2 (without CO2) led to a reduction in adsorption capacity due to the incomplete regeneration of one of the adsorption sites involved. In contrast, the remarkable stability of KMG30, as known from SEWGS process studies (Oliveira et al., 2008; van Selow et al., 2009; Boon et al., 2014), was confirmed during cycles of CO2 adsorption/steam purge.
Further to the improvement of adsorption-enhanced reactions for precombustion CO2. capture as well as oxyfuel combustion, membrane-assisted chemical looping reforming (MA-CLR) and membrane-assisted sorption-enhanced reforming (MA-SER) for CH4 reforming were modelled by Pouw et al. In both cases, H2 perm-selective membranes were introduced in order to allow for the production of high-purity H2 product directly. Taking into account the increased window for carbon formation and the effect on operating conditions, MA-CLR was shown to outperform MA-SER in terms of H2 yield, energy efficiency, and carbon capture ratio. Nevertheless, MA-SER offers advantages in terms of producing pure CO2 product, and allowing for a lower reactor temperature.
The thermochemical conversion of CO2 with H2 can be enhanced by the adsorption of H2O byproduct. In this context, the sorption-enhanced DME synthesis (SEDMES) has now been demonstrated with a multi-column test-rig by van Kampen et al., allowing for a continuous single-pass carbon yield of up to 95% well beyond the thermodynamic equilibrium.
The progress in design, engineering, and optimisation of adsorption-enhanced reactions depends on finding a delicate balance between the (intrinsic) kinetics of the individual reactions and reactor engineering. In that sense, the recent findings reported in Frontiers in Chemical Engineering Research Topic ‘Adsorption-Enhanced Reactions Design, Engineering and Optimisation’ present relevant advances in the field. Experimentally, the stability conditions of potassium-promoted hydrotalcites for sorption-enhanced water-gas shift have been further elucidated under repetitive exposure to CO2, H2O, and mixtures thereof. On a process level, continuous multicolumn sorption-enhanced DME synthesis has been successfully validated. Modelling studies have shown how the selective removal of H2 via membranes can affect the driving force for coking, and thus the operating window, in sorption-enhanced and chemical looping reactors. On a process level, the use of advanced Stateflow modelling techniques has led to new and improved cycle designs for the sorption-enhanced water-gas shift process that yield increased working capacity. The reported research shows that the development of adsorption-enhanced reactions is making progress, both in the field of the required materials as well as on a process level. Further development in the coming years will yield advanced, intensified process technology that enables the industrial energy transition.
Author contributions
JB: Writing–original draft, Writing–review and editing. IM: Writing–original draft, Writing–review and editing. SR: Writing–original draft, Writing–review and editing. MS: Writing–original draft, Writing–review and editing.
Funding
The author(s) declare that no financial support was received for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Conflict of interest
The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
The author(s) declared that they were an editorial board member of Frontiers, at the time of submission. This had no impact on the peer review process and the final decision.
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Keywords: adsorption enhanced reaction, CO2 capture, CO2 utilization, process intensifcation, sustainable chemical industry
Citation: Boon J, Martínez I, Rojas S and Soria MA (2024) Editorial: Adsorption-enhanced reactions design, engineering and optimization. Front. Chem. Eng. 6:1396814. doi: 10.3389/fceng.2024.1396814
Received: 06 March 2024; Accepted: 07 March 2024;
Published: 18 March 2024.
Edited and Reviewed by:
Martino Di Serio, University of Naples Federico II, ItalyCopyright © 2024 Boon, Martínez, Rojas and Soria. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
*Correspondence: Jurriaan Boon, jurriaan.boon@tno.nl