Kinetics of Carbon Dioxide with tertiary Amines in aqueous solution

The reaction of CO2 with TEA, DMMEA, and DEMEA has been studied at 293, 303, 318 and 333 K. All the kinetic experiments were carried out in a stirred cell reactor operated with a flat, smooth and horizontal gas-liquid interface. A numerical method, which describes mass transfer accompanied by reversible chemical reactions, has been applied to infer rate constants from the experimental data. It is argued that the contribution of the CO2 reaction with OH- to the observed reaction rate may have been overstimated in most literature on tertiary amine kinetics as serious depletion of OH- toward the gas-liquid interface usually occurs. For all the amines studied, the reaction order in amine was found to be about one for each temperature investigated. This is in good agreement with the base catalysis mechanism proposed by Donaldson and Nguyen (1980). All kinetic data could be summarized reasonably well in one Brønsted relationship.