A comprehensive multidisciplinary investigation on CO capture from diesel engine.

Climate change and global warming are the visible consequences of the increased amount of carbon dioxide (CO) in the atmosphere. Among the various sources of anthropogenic CO emission, the diesel engine has a significant contribution. The development of a reliable system to efficiently minimize CO emissions from diesel engines to the safest level is lacking in the open literature. Therefore, a comprehensive multidisciplinary approach has been applied in this paper to investigate the efficacy of the post-combustion carbon capture (PCC) process for the diesel engine. The experiments have been performed on the exhaust of a direct injection diesel engine at five different brake powers with blends of aqueous ammonia (AQ_NH), monoethanolamine (MEA), N,N-dimethylethanolamine (DMEA), and 1-ethyl-3-methylimidazolium tetrafluoroborate (Cmim BF) ionic liquid (IL) as an absorbent for CO capture. The reaction mechanism of these absorbent with CO are also studied by the geometrical, energetical, MESP, frontier molecular orbitals, and NBO analysis using the first-principles density functional theory (DFT) calculations. The maximum CO absorption efficiency of almost 97% was achieved for the blend consisting of 67% of AQ_NH and 33% of MEA. Moreover, AQ_MEA and blend of AQ_NH, DMEA, and Cmim BF ionic liquid showed 96% and 94% CO absorption efficiency, respectively.