Thursday, May 23, 2013

Separating the ammonia from the carbon dioxide

Once the ammonia carbonate has decomposed, you are left with ammonia and carbon dioxide.  The carbon dioxide isn't useful, so how to get rid of it?  This article says how to do that.

Reading through it, it may not be useful for the purposes I am looking for.  Anyway, there are ways to do it, I suppose.  You want something fairly simple and small.

The movie Apollo 13 showed how they solved their carbon dioxide problem by switching out a canister which removed it from their air.  What I wonder is if this would work on a mixture of ammonia and carbon dioxide?

Now, this article looks like ammonia is pretty good for capturing carbon dioxide.  Now that is interesting.  What do you do to separate them again?  What if you want a system the regenerates the ammonia so it can capture more carbon dioxide?

You probably have to use the first system linked above, but we don't want to do that.  It isn't simple nor small.

Update:

Something quick and energy intensive may work.  Ammonia and carbon dioxide freeze to solid at about the same temperature, but carbon dioxide sublimates to gas.  Not a liquid state at standard atmospheric pressure.  So, freeze the gas to solid and heat it slightly letting the carbon dioxide sublimate off.

Keep in mind that to store hydrogen is much more energy intensive.  This loses energy to be sure, but less than using liquid hydrogen.


No comments: