Modeling of Spiral Wound Membrane Module for CO2 Capture from Natural Gas

The search for viable alternatives to the traditional energy intensive techniques method such as distillation and adsorption has led to the massive research on membranes. Fiber tube membrane module and spiral wound membrane module (SWM) emerged as the most widely used in industry compared to other membrane module due to their high mass transfer area. However, fiber tube module has been dominating in the gas separation industry including the capture of CO2 from natural gas while spiral wound module is used widely in reverse osmosis application. Hence, this thesis aims to overcome the limitation of the available literature for mathematical modeling of spiral wound module for gas separation. A new approach to solve the mass transfer problem posed by the permeation in spiral wound module is presented. A two dimensional mass transfer in a radial crossflow has been modeled using ‘succession of state’ approach. The algorithm models the spiral wound module separation for CO2 capture from natural gas, simulating the permeate and residue composition as well as the flow rate in MATLAB. Several factors including feed flow rate, feed pressure and leaf number are proved to affect the performance of spiral wound module.