No. 364: High performance film for effective separation of carbon dioxide form exhaust fumes (November 28, 2011)

A research team made up of researchers from Research Institute of Innovative Technology for the Earth, Kurary, and NittoDenko developed a high performance film that can separate carbon dioxide from exhaust fumes effectively. Should it be used in combination with carbon dioxide storage technology, it will be highly applicable to coal fired power generation that hardly emits global warming gases. The newly developed film has a structure that diverges in a radial pattern from the center called dendrimer. It permeates only carbon dioxide by dint of nitrogen in the compound. The envisioned usage is to flow exhaust fumes in a pipe and collect leaking carbon dioxide into a container.

Because the newly developed film has enough nature to permeate carbon dioxide, it is necessary to increase the permeation speed to a practical level besides decreasing the thickness from the current 500 micrometers to 10 micrometers. The research team wishes to achieve the goals in less than one year. It plans to build large-scale equipment and conduct a substantiative experiment using the gases of an iron works in 2015. The chemical absorption method that uses a special solution is widespread to collect and store carbon dioxide in fired power generation plants. It will be possible to half the collection cost should the new film be used for the collection. The three companies and Nippon Steel Engineering founded an organization for the study of the next-generation technology of film module last February.