Tailor-Made Core-Shell CaO/TiO2-Al2O3 Architecture as a High-Capacity and Long-Life CO2 Sorbent

CaO-based sorbents are widely used for CO2 capture, steam methane reforming, and gasification enhancement, but the sorbents suffer from rapid deactivation during successive carbonation/calcination cycles. This research proposes a novel self-assembly template synthesis (SATS) method to prepare a hierarchical structure CaO-based sorbent, Ca-rich, Al2O3-supported, and TiO2-stabilized in a core-shell microarchitecture (CaO/TiO2-Al2O3). The cyclic CO2 capture performance of CaO/TiO2-Al2O3 is compared with those of pure CaO and CaO/Al2O3. CaO/TiO2-Al2O3 sorbent achieved superior and durable CO2 capture capacity of 0.52 g CO2/g sorbent after 20 cycles under the mild calcination condition and retained a high-capacity and long-life performance of 0.44 g CO2/g sorbent after 104 cycles under the severe calcination condition, much higher than those of CaO and CaO/Al2O3. The microstructure characterization of CaO/TiO2-Al2O3 confirmed that the core-shell structure of composite support effectively inhibited the reaction between active component (CaO particles) and main support (Al2O3 particles) by TiO2 addition, which contributed to its properties of high reactivity, thermal stability, mechanical strength, and resistance to agglomeration and sintering.