Synthesis and Characterization of Covalent Organic Polymer (COP-1) Adsorbent for Carbon Dioxide Capture

Carbon dioxide (CO2) capture from natural gas at high pressure conditions with high CO2 capture ability as well as high selectivity of CO2 over CH4 at low cost remains a major challenge. Recently, covalent organic polymer (COP-1), an adsorbent discovered by Patel (2012) reports the highest carbon dioxide capture of all time of 5616 mg g-1 at 200 bar with high thermal stability and desirable characteristics promising for natural gas application. However, the current research information on COP-1 is limited where Patel (2012) only concentrates on CO2 / N2 separation and there is no data on CH4 adsorption which remains a research gap. Besides, the synthesis methodology is not described in detail hence posing a major challenge to replicate the synthesis of COP-1 for further studies. The objective of this research is to synthesis and characterise COP-1 to validate the material synthesised and study on morphology of COP-1 as well as CO2 / CH4 adsorption capacity. COP-1 synthesised in this research are characterised using analysis of FT-IR, XRD, NMR, CHN, EDX, TGA, BET surface area, pore size, and FESEM. Pure gas adsorption of CO2 and CH4 has also been performed using BELSORP. Overall, the characterisation result shows similarities to Patel (2012) in terms of linkage, functional group and absence of crystallinity with difference such that both surface area and CO2 capture using COP-1 in this research is about half of that obtained by Patel (2012). Pure gas adsorption of CO2 and CH4 using COP-1 in this research is found to be 0.59244 mmol g-1 and 0.11405 mmol g-1 respectively. A simple selectivity of CO2 / CH4 is calculated as 5.19. This research closed the research gap for CH4 capture at low pressure as well as morphology of COP-1. Further study could be done on CO2 / CH4 binary gas selectivity with high amount of CO2 at high pressure similar to natural gas application.