North Carolina State Wilson College of Textiles researchers are working on the development of carbon dioxide (CO2) capture filters including a cotton fabric and an enzyme called carbonic anhydrase – one of nature’s tools for speeding chemical reactions.
Initial laboratory testing suggests that scaled up, it represents a step forward in the development of a possible new technology that could reduce CO2 emissions from biomass, coal or natural gas power plants.
“With this technology, we want to stop carbon dioxide emissions at the source, and power plants are the main source of CO2 emissions right now,” said Jialong Shen, postdoctoral research scholar at NC State. “We think the main advantage of our method compared to similarly targeted research is that it could be easily scaled up using traditional textile manufacturing facilities.”
Carbonic anhydrase can speed a reaction in which carbon dioxide and water will turn into bicarbonate.
To create the filter, the researchers attached the enzyme to a two-layer cotton fabric by immersing it in chitosan, which acts like a glue.
The researchers then ran a series of experiments to see how well their filter would separate an air mixture of CO2 and nitrogen, with success rates of 52.3% CO2 with a single-stacked filter and 81.7% with a double-stacked filter. While the findings are promising, the filter still needs to be tested against the faster air flow rates that are used in commercial power plants. For comparison, a full-scale operation would need to process more than 10 million litres of flue gas per minute. The researchers are working with collaborators to test at a bigger scale and to compare their technology to other comparable technologies.