Carbon capture technology has promising applications in both spaceflight and terrestrial applications. In extraterrestrial environments, capturing and utilizing CO2 in-situ is useful for crewed spaceflight life support and Martian oxygen production. In the terrestrial environment, one major contributor of atmospheric CO2 is post-combustion flue gas, which can contain up to 20% CO2. Capturing this CO2 could reduce the environmental impact of this common industrial process. The Rapid Cycle Temperature Swing Adsorption (RC-TSA) pump is an innovative technology designed to capture CO2 efficiently. The RC-TSA leverages a stacked plate geometry to rapidly cycle multiple zeolite-coated beds. The thin layers allow for rapid heat transfer of the zeolite coating, which improves performance over previously tested pump designs. The design is favorable for scalability and manufacturability. Initial MATLAB modeling efforts show favorable breakthrough capacities and reduced cycle times. The model predicts that a hardware demonstrator has potential CO2 throughputs of 5.0 to 8.2 kg/day. These results suggest promising results for a terrestrial application and may extend to extraterrestrial applications.
Wilson et al. (Sun,) studied this question.