Luis Alconero, PatriciaDuvieusart, AlexandreAlexandreDuvieusart2025-05-142025-05-142025-05-142023https://hdl.handle.net/2078.2/32244Our societies need to make an energy transition to reduce anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions and mitigate the consequences of global warming. One of the levers for decarbonising our energy production and industry is Carbon Capture, Utilisation and Storage (CCUS). The conventional post-combustion CCUS technology, CO2 chemical absorption using amine-based absorbents has, however, the disadvantages that amines are toxic and that the absorbent regeneration requires large amounts of energy. Many emerging technologies aim to overcome these drawbacks. This work focuses on one of them, gas-liquid membrane contactors. One limit to the sustainability of membrane contactors is the use of perfluorinated compounds as membrane material, which are recognised as global pollutants. The use of biopolymers as alternative materials has the potential to reduce the environmental footprint of the technology. In this work, a bio-based membrane contactor was developed using polylactic acid (PLA). Porous flat-sheet PLA membranes were produced by non-solvent induced phase separation (NIPS). The influence of the solvent type and the PLA concentration of the dope solution on the membranes' morphologies, and ultimately on their ability to capture CO2, was investigated. PLA membranes where mechanically stable in the membrane contactor set-up and their overall mass transfer coefficient was determined up to 1.9x10^(-5) [m^(3)m^(-2)s^(-1)], which is the same order of magnitude of the benchmark PVDF membrane. Additionally, it was show that PLA membranes could easily be recycled while conserving their properties, which is a good step towards more sustainability. This work also identified challenges related to the intrinsic nature of PLA, such as membrane wetting and compatibility with common benign absorbents. It was found that chemical stability of PLA with aqueous Na2CO3 and K2CO3 significantly increased using high molecular weight PLA. This work is a starting point for the use of PLA as membrane contactor material, that will require various obstacles to be overcome.CCUSMembrane contactorNIPSBiopolymersPLABio-based materialtext::thesis::master thesisthesis:40710