The Center for Negative Carbon Emissions DAC Testbed offer a variety of services led by a team with extensive research and field experience.
The Center for Negative Carbon Emissions Direct Air Capture Testbed is a world-class facility providing a comprehensive understanding of carbon capture and storage, climate policy, certification, sorbent development, supply chain and long-range planning experience for climate change mitigation.
The CNCE DAC Testbed is home to several custom-made, state-of-the-art sorbent characterization systems that accommodate experimentation ranging from milligram to kilogram scales. This includes a methodology to quickly screen performance characterization of multiple sorbents for carbon capture in a short time, which accounts for sorbents to be scaled up from mg to kg scales. These methodologies evaluate essential environmental conditions (temperature, humidity, wind velocities) that affect sorbent performance.
The CNCE DAC Testbed collaborates with industry, national labs and academic researchers to synthesize a range of sorbent materials, process them into factors that optimize collecting CO2 from the air and extracting and concentrating CO2 from the sorbent, precisely and accurately measure its DAC performance, designing and fabricated customize DAC test equipment, and developing bench scale and pilot scale DAC systems since its inception in 2014. One of these successes was conducted in partnership with Carbon Collect LLC and involved the scale-up of a sorbent from mg to hundreds of kg, as well as a program that placed the MechanicalTreeTM prototype on ASU’s Tempe campus for technology testing and evaluation.
Center for Negative Carbon Emissions facilities can be divided into distinct categories related to carbon removal:
- Sorbent capacity, kinetics characterization and scale up, from mg to kg
- Outdoor pilot scale test pad experiments for carbon capture and/or storage (technology validation studies)
- Data interpretation and presentation based on client or ASU research
- Technical results interpretation, analysis and application recommendations
- Sorbent synthesis and form factors for better performance
- Feasibility studies for climate mitigation applications
- Certification of CO2 removal services, advice, structural application and proof concept
- 3rd party CO2 removal certification and carbon durability analysis
- Mathematical modeling
- Industrial carbon management analysis, including recommendations for alternative applications and approaches
- Analysis of carbon storage including feasibility, site preferences and alternative considerations
- Conceptual analysis service that may include recommendations for new technologies or applications
Service Center bench-scale systems
Moisture swing closed system device and temperature swing milligram scale device
This system is capable of screening moisture and temperature swing sorbents on the kinetics quickly and can absorb and desorb CO2. The evaluation of each sorbent can range from a few hours (two to four hours to fast screening) to a few days, depending on the objective of the experiment. The apparatus can control humidity between <20 to ~92% RH. The moisture can be kept fixed or set to vary in case the sorbent performs a moisture swing. The closed loop system can be operated with different sample chambers accommodating various small-scale form factors.
CO2 sorption open flow system
This system has been created to screen sorbents on the gram scale in an open-flow setting. It has a continuous flow of ambient air to simulate direct air from the environment to pass through the sorbent. This system is ideal for testing sorbents first screened on the mg scale, which goes to the 0.1-2.0 g scale. It also can be used to test small-scale form factors and composite sorbents. This system’s humidity is also controlled to evaluate its effect on the sorbent’s kinetics and capacity.
CO2 steam desorption system
This system was designed to evaluate CO2 desorption (regeneration) from a solid sorbent and its form factors on the gram scale (0.1-2.0 g). The system is designed to operate either on a steam heat regeneration process or a dry heat with a temperature of up to 95C. Higher temperatures can also be achieved in an oven up to 250° C for dry heat sorbent’s regeneration.
Precision open flow system
This system can screen sorbents by characterizing kinetics and capacity for moisture and thermal swing sorbents at different temperatures, CO2 partial pressure, and humidity levels of powder or membrane sorbents with 0.1 umol/m2/s accuracy. The temperature range can vary in a fixed value between 25-45° C (ideal for moisture swing isotherms). The relative humidity can vary dynamically between 0-95%. Depending on the experimental objectives, the CO2 partial pressure can be fixed or dynamic between 400 ppm and 100% CO2. Generally, for direct air capture evaluation, we keep the CO2 set at 400 ppm, close to atmospheric conditions. The sorbents to be evaluated are in the gram scale (0.1-2.0g). The system can be programmed to run a few cycles or several, depending on the experimental objectives.
Wind tunnel
The wind tunnel has been designed to evaluate solid sorbent samples on a 5-100g scale. The sorbents can be coupled with more complex form factors with engineering designs to simulate the scale-up from a lab scale to an applicable engineering design. The wind tunnel is a closed system with 56L of air volume. The air volume has an ambient CO2 partial pressure of ~ 420 ppm. The CO2 levels inside the wind tunnel can also be managed by injecting more CO2 depending on the experimental objectives. Beyond evaluating larger sample sizes and form factors, this system allows the evaluation of the wind velocity from 0.7 to > 12 m/s and the RH between 10 to 90% under 25° C. This is an ideal system to evaluate passive direct air capture scenarios and mass transfer limitations of a sorbent on its designed form factor. This system can determine moisture swing samples CO2 absorption and desorption and temperature swing samples CO2 absorption.
Bench-scale sorbent regenerator (Sapling)
The Sapling reactor can be operated on the kg scale with sorbents ranging from 100-2,000 g. This system is an upper scale following the wind tunnel studies. It is also capable of evaluating specific and complex sorbent form factors. The reactor can consider CO2 desorption (regeneration) with 80-95° C steam. CO2 absorption capacity can be evaluated in two ways:
1) In-situ testing, the absorption is performed indoors with a blower
2) Ex-situ testing, the sorbent is placed outdoors for the capture phase.
This is a robust system that can be used one scale before a pilot plant.
Contact the Center
If you are interested in collaborating with CNCE on developing new sorbents, evaluating DAC sorbent materials, form factors or bench and pilot scale DAC systems, please fill out our contact form and a member of our team will get back to you shortly.