Rapid CO₂ capture from ambient air by sorbent-containing porous electrospun fibers made with the solvothermal polymer additive removal technique

Direct air capture (DAC) of CO₂ is an emerging technology in the battle against climate change. Many sorbent materials and different technologies such as moisture swing sorption have been explored for this application. However, developing efficient scaffolds to adopt promising sorbents with fast kinetics is challenging, and very limited effort has been reported to address this critical issue. In this work, the availability and kinetic uptake of CO₂ in sorbents embedded in various matrices are studied. Three scaffolds including a commercially available industrial film containing ion-exchange resin (IER), IER particles embedded in dense electrospun fibers, and IER particles embedded in porous electrospun fibers are compared, in which a solvothermal polymer additive removal technique is used to create porosity in porous fibers. A frequency response technique is developed to measure the uptake capacity, sorbent availability, and kinetic uptake rate. The porous fiber has 90% IER availability, while the dense fibers have 50% particle accessibility. The sorption half time for both electrospun fiber samples is 10 ± 3 min. Our experimental results demonstrate that electrospinning polymer/sorbent composites is a promising technology to facilitate the handleability of sorbent particles and to improve the sorption kinetics, in which the IER embedded in porous electrospun fibers shows the highest cycle capacity with an uptake rate of 1.4 mol CO₂ per gram-hour.