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MartinChinarro_11601801_2020.pdf
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- Recent reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change state that global net anthropogenic CO2 emissions have to reach net zero by 2050 in order to mitigate climate change. This statement urges our governments to face one of the biggest threads of the century and to take urgent action to combat it. Carbon capture and storage is one of the abatement strategies that have been proposed, where chemical CO2 absorption using amines is the benchmark technology. Nevertheless, there is plenty of room for improvement, since amines' high energy demand and environmental impact make it a non-sustainable process. It is in this light that alternative technologies for CO2 post-combustion capture are recently gaining a lot of attention. Among them, the development of green aqueous solvents promoted by enzymes have a lot of potential. On the other hand, poly(ionic liquid)-ionic liquid thin film membrane composites present ideal CO2 selectivity and permeability. In this master thesis project, first steps towards a novel combination of membrane contactors, carbonic anhydrase enzyme, poly(ionic liquids) and sodium carbonate solution is presented. The proposition is to design a novel configuration by immobilizing carbonic anhydrase enzyme in a poly(ionic liquid)-ionic liquid to make composite membranes that are used as membrane contactors, where absorption is catalyzed into an aqueous benign solvent (sodium carbonate). Synthesis and polymerization of the ionic liquid [VHIm][NTf2] are performed and carbonic anhydrase enzyme is characterized to study its size and morphology prior to membrane immobilization. Lastly, a commercial PVDF membrane is tested on an absorption setup, where parameters are optimized, and mass transfer is thoroughly studied both experimentally and using correlations. The insight gained on the system's mass transfer phenomena comprises the first step towards the development of advanced membranes for CO2 capture.