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Frontiers of Chemical Science and Engineering >> 2021, Volume 15, Issue 3 doi: 10.1007/s11705-020-1964-3

Integrated adsorption and absorption process for post-combustion CO

. Department of Chemical Engineering, The University of Western Australia, Perth WA 6009, Australia.. Department of Chemical Engineering, University of Melbourne, Victoria 3010, Australia.. Department of Chemical Engineering, Monash University, Victoria 3800, Australia

Received: 2020-08-25 Accepted: 2020-10-21 Available online: 2020-10-21

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Abstract

This study explored the feasibility of integrating an adsorption and solvent scrubbing process for post-combustion CO capture from a coal-fired power plant. This integrated process has two stages: the first is a vacuum swing adsorption (VSA) process using activated carbon as the adsorbent, and the second stage is a solvent scrubber/stripper system using monoethanolamine (30 wt-%) as the solvent. The results showed that the adsorption process could enrich CO in the flue gas from 12 to 50 mol-% with a CO recovery of >90%, and the concentrated CO stream fed to the solvent scrubber had a significantly lower volumetric flowrate. The increased CO concentration and reduced feed flow to the absorption section resulted in significant reduction in the diameter of the solvent absorber, bringing the size of the absorber from uneconomically large to readily achievable domain. In addition, the VSA process could also remove most of the oxygen initially existed in the feed gas, alleviating the downstream corrosion and degradation problems in the absorption section. The findings in this work will reduce the technical risks associated with the state-of-the art solvent absorption technology for CO capture and thus accelerate the deployment of such technologies to reduce carbon emissions.

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