Molecular investigation into the effect of carbon nanotubes interaction with CO2 in molecular separation using microporous polymeric membranes.

The use of nanofluids has been recently of great interest to separate acidic contaminants such as CO2. The main objective of this research is to assess the influence of carbon nanotubes (CNTs) addition to distilled water on enhancing the CO2 molecular separation through a porous membrane contactor (PMC). For this aim, a comprehensive model is developed based on non-wetted and counter-current operational modes to evaluate the principal mass and momentum transport equations in tube, membrane and shell compartments of PMC. Consequently, a CFD-based axisymmetrical simulation is implemented according to finite element technique (FET) to prognosticate the results. It is found from the results that the addition of 0.1 wt% carbon nanotubes (CNTs) particles to water significantly enhances the mass transfer and consequently the CO2 molecular separation efficiency from 38 to 63.3%. This considerable enhancement can be justified due to the existence of two momentous phenomena including Brownian motion and Grazing effect, which enhance the mass transport of CO2 molecules in the PMC. Moreover, the effect of CNTs concentration, some membrane's parameters such as number of hollow fibers and porosity and also some module's design parameters including module radius and length on the CO2 separation performance are investigated in this paper as another highlight of the current work.