Investigation of CO₂ solubility in monoethanolamine hydrochloride based deep eutectic solvents and physical properties measurements

Deep eutectic solvents (DESs) have drawn a growing research interest for applications in a wide range of scientific and industrial arenas. However, a limited effort has been reported in the area of gas separation processes and particularly the carbon dioxide capture. This study introduces a novel set of DESs that were prepared by complexing ethylenediamine (EDA), monoethanolamine (MEA), tetraethylenepentamine (TEPA), triethylenetetramine (TETA) and diethylenetriamine (DETA) as hydrogen bond donors to monoethanolamide hydrochloride (EAHC) salt as a hydrogen bond acceptor. The absorption capacity of CO₂ was evaluated by exploiting a method based on measuring the pressure drop during the absorption process. The solubility of different DESs was studied at a temperature of 313.15 K and initial pressure of 0.8 MPa. The DES systems 1EAHC:9DETA, 1EAHC:9TETA and 1EAHC:9TEPA achieved the highest CO₂ solubility of 0.6611, 0.6572 and 0.7017 mol CO₂·(mole DES)⁻¹ respectively. The results showed that CO₂ solubility in the DESs increased with increasing the molar ratio of hydrogen bond donor. In addition, the CO₂ solubility increased as the number of amine groups in the solvent increases, therefore, increasing the alkyl chain length in the DESs, resulted in increasing the CO₂ solubility. FTIR analysis confirms the DES synthesis since no new functional group was identified. The FTIR spectra also revealed the carbamate formation in DES-CO₂ mixtures. In addition, the densities and viscosities of the synthesized DESs were also measured. The CO₂ initial investigation of reported DESs shows that these can be potential alternative for conventional solvents in CO₂ capture processes.