Energy efficiency of a hybrid membrane/condensation process for VOC (Volatile Organic Compounds) recovery from air: A generic approach

Bouchra Belaissaoui, Yann Le Moullec and Eric Favre

Energy, 2016, vol. 95, issue C, 291-302

Abstract: The recovery of VOC (Volatile Organic Compounds) from air is a major issue in terms of minimizing the environmental impact of numerous industrial processes (chemistry, food, pharmaceutical, metallurgy, refrigeration…). Non destructive VOC capture technologies are preferentially used in order to enable the recycling of a large ratio of the emitted compounds. To that respect, condensation is attractive because it offers the possibility to recover the VOC from the air stream under liquid state thanks to a physical, non destructive, separation process. Nevertheless, a very low (cryogenic) condensation temperature is often required in order to achieve that target. In that case, a membrane VOC pre-concentration step can be of major interest in order to increase the VOC content of the condensation unit and possibly improve the energy efficiency of the overall operation. In this study, a systematic analysis of the energy efficiency (overall electrical energy needed per kg of recovered VOC) of a standalone condensation process is compared to a hybrid process based on membrane concentration + condensation. It is shown that the standalone condensation remains more energy efficient for high boiling VOC (e.g. toluene, octane, acetone), while a significant improvement of the energy efficiency is obtained with the hybrid process for intermediate to low boiling temperature VOC (e.g. propane, ethane, ethylene…). A generic map of the most energy efficient VOC recovery process as a function of the VOC boiling temperature is finally proposed and potential improvement of the hybrid approach, based on a retentate recycling strategy is discussed.

Keywords: Energy efficiency; Hybrid process; Volatile Organic Compounds; Recovery; Membrane; Condensation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360544215016485
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:energy:v:95:y:2016:i:c:p:291-302

DOI: 10.1016/j.energy.2015.12.006

Access Statistics for this article

Energy is currently edited by Henrik Lund and Mark J. Kaiser

More articles in Energy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().