Search

Carbon dioxide (CO2) sequestration, storage and recycling will greatly benefit from comprehensive studies of physical and chemical gas-liquid processes involving CO2. Over the past five years, microfluidics emerged as a valuable tool in CO2-related research, due to superior mass and heat transfer, reduced axial dispersion, well-defined gas-liquid interfacial areas and the ability to vary reagent concentrations in a high-throughput manner. This Minireview highlights recent progress in microfluidic studies of CO2-related processes, including dissolution of CO2 in physical solvents, CO2 reactions, the utilization of CO2 in materials science, and the use of supercritical CO2 as a "green" solvent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Frustrated Lewis pairs (FLPs) comprising sterically hindered Lewis acids and bases offer the capability to reversibly capture CO2 under mild reaction conditions. The determination of equilibrium constants and thermodynamic properties of these reactions should enable assessment of the efficiency of a particular FLP system for CO2sequestration and provide insights for design of new, efficient formulations of FLP catalysts for CO2capture. We have developed a microfluidic approach to studies of FLP–CO2reactions, which provides their thermodynamic characterization that is not accessible otherwise. The approach enables the determination of the equilibrium reaction constants at different temperatures, the enthalpy, the entropy, and the Gibbs energy of these reactions, as well as the enhancement factor. The microfluidic methodology has been validated by applying it to the well-characterized reaction of CO2with a secondary amine. The microfluidic approach can be applied for fundamental thermodynamic studies of other gas–liquid reactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]