I am trying to design a process that purifies a water stream which gets heated to provide steam as feed for a steam reforming process. Essentially the process is to get rid of most (~>90%) of the carbon dioxide in the stream, I have been researching into processes widely used in industry which I could design but have not found much.
Hi,
Membrane contactors provide a clean, maintenance free method to remove carbon dioxide from water without any chemical pH adjustment.
The oil and gas industry used various types of amine systems to "sweeten" hydrocarbon gas streams by removing H2S and sometimes just CO2. You did not say what the starting CO2 content of your steam is or how much you need to remove. If the CO2 level is significant, then I cannot see any reason what one of the commercial amine sweetening systems could not be adapted to your application.
You have a large number of options to do this. It all depends on the scale you want to do this and the budget you have. As I see you are from a university, i presume the process does not need to treat multiple cubic meters per hour.
Your simplest (and cheapest) option is to spray the water. You can make this very easily by pumping the water through a short pipe with the jet hitting a horizontal plate about 20cm lower than the orifice. The plate must be about 2 times the diameter of the water jet. This will make a beautiful umbrella shaped spray of droplets. The water should fall roughly a meter. This system will provide about 70% CO2-reduction every time you spray the water, so you need to do this twice. Do provice sufficient ventilation to get rid of the CO2.
If you have a larger budget, the water is clean and want to do this for a long running system, then consider a stripping tower filled with PALL-rings. This will provice you with very high removal percentages if you choose the right RQ-value (ratio of air to water flow).
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