CEAD, a family-owned thermofluids, thermal management and related technology research and development consultant business based in Cambridge, England, won the 2019-2020 Rushlight Clean Environment Award with their Combined Energy Recovery and CO2 emissions (PolyCapture) capture technology.
CEAD’s PolyCapture technology is a highly efficient carbon dioxide (CO2) capture system for carbon-intensive process streams/systems such as post-combustion flue gases or processes that require removal of CO2 e.g. biogas producing plants. A typicalPolyCapture system is made up of two elements; (i) an energy recovery unit that stores and/ or converts to electricity the heat energy and (ii) dry polymer sorbent material that removes and captures CO2.
The main advantages of PolyCapture technology emanate from its novel CO2 capture sorbent material made of molecularly imprinted polymer (MIPs) beads. The resulting unique and main user benefits are:
- Lower capital investment cost and lower energy demand than the existing technologies
- Lower operating cost due to PolyCapture energy recovery feature(s), lower operating pressure and temperature (less than 10 bar and less than 35°C to capture and approximately 90ºC to regeneration, respectively)
- PolyCapture sorbent material has high CO2 selectivity property
- It is less sensitive to presence of biogas contaminants e.g. water vapour, N2, etc.
PolyCapture technology is now in the material manufacturing and production scale-up development stage and field trial prototypes are being produced for the biogas upgrading sector.