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Aiming to solve the problem of high ammonia loss during ammonia-based CO2 chemical absorption process, an ammonia wash system was recommended to be added after the absorber column. Hence, we need to deal with a lot of wash water. Recently, we proposed a vacuum membrane distillation (VMD) system to regenerate ammonia from ammonia wash water. The stripping gaseous ammonia can be used for producing a high-concentration ammonia solution for solvent make-up in the CO2 capture system, and the wash water after distillation can be reused. In this work, we investigated 0.3 M ammonia solutions on different operation factors such as feed flow rate, feed temperature, pressure in the permeate side, and CO2 loading. The experimental results show that both temperature and pressure in the permeate side have significant influences on the ammonia stripping process. Increasing feed temperature and reducing pressure in the permeate side will not only improve ammonia removal efficiency, but also enhance total transmembrane flux and overall mass transfer coefficient. The increase of feed flow rate can improve the total transmembrane flux, but will lower the ammonia removal efficiency. The increase of CO2 loading in the feed ammonia solution will decrease the ammonia removal rate. Furthermore, we investigated a continuous circulation experiment and found that the ammonia removal efficiency largely depended on the removal time. The removal efficiency can be up to 95.6% with a 120 min continuous circulation time. We think this VMD system has the potential to recover ammonia and solve the solvent loss problem. © 2015 Society of Chemical Industry and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The low CO2 absorption rate and high ammonia volatile loss rate are two major issues for the ammonia-based CO2 capture technology. In this work, we investigated the effect of total pressure on CO2 absorption and ammonia vaporization in ammonia solutions on a wetted-wall column. We found that the elevated pressure absorption process was an effective way to increase CO2 absorption rate and suppress ammonia vaporization at the same time. We also studied the mass transfer mechanism at elevated pressure and found the overall mass transfer coefficients of CO2 absorption in both ammonia and MEA solutions at elevated pressures were lower than that under atmospheric pressure. The overall mass transfer coefficients of CO2 absorption in 3 M NH3 (298 K) at 1, 1.5, 2, 2.5 bar were 0.723 × 10−6, 0.652 × 10−6, 0.591 × 10−6, 0.555 × 10−6 mol/(s m2 Pa) and the corresponding gas side mass transfer coefficients were 13.8 × 10−6, 4.52 × 10−6, 2.61 × 10−6, 2.03 × 10−6 mol/(s m2 Pa), respectively. We also found the gas side mass transfer coefficient in the wetted-wall column was not only dependent on the hydrodynamic conditions of the column but also influenced by the total pressure. © 2014 Society of Chemical Industry and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]