Joule-Heated Woven Fiber Contactors for Direct Air Capture

Practical direct air capture (DAC) demands a sorbent contactor that simultaneously delivers high active-material loading, low flow resistance, efficient mass transfer, and rapid regeneration─requirements that conventional sorbent architectures rarely satisfy together. Here, we present a woven fiber contactor that addresses these requirements by interlacing dry-fabricated zeolite Y/PTFE fibers with copper wire supports into a structured contactor. Compared to a stacked laminate configuration, the woven sorbent exhibited markedly more efficient mass transfer, yielding a narrower mass transfer zone (LMTZ = 4.4 mm and 11.1 mm at 50 sccm) and a steeper breakthrough front. This structural advantage translated into robust sorption performance, with CO2 capture capacity varying by only 11.7% across a 10-fold increase in feed flow rate (50–500 sccm, corresponding to superficial velocities 5.79 × 10–3 to 5.79 × 10–2 m/s) compared to 19.2% for the stacked laminate. The woven architecture further reduced pressure drop by 7- to 18-fold over a wide range of superficial velocities (1.16 × 10–2–5.79 × 10–1 m/s). The integrated copper wires enabled electrified temperature swing adsorption (e-TSA) with near-instantaneous heating, driving CO2 desorption within 1 min. Over 10 consecutive adsorption–desorption cycles, the module retained an average capacity of 1.01 mmol/gsorbent with less than 6.93% variance. Together, these results establish the woven fiber contactor as a scalable platform that unites high sorbent loading, low flow resistance, efficient mass transfer, and rapid electrified regeneration for energy-efficient DAC.