Date of Award
6-30-2016
Document Type
Open Access Dissertation
Department
Chemical Engineering
First Advisor
James A Ritter
Abstract
Reducing the anthropogenic CO2 emissions and lowering the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere has become one of the most important environmental issues of recent times. To this end, the development of a cost effective pressure swing adsorption (PSA) process, utilizing commercially available 13X zeolite as the adsorbent, is underway to remove and concentrate CO2 in the flue gas of a coal-fired power plant. This systematic development effort has been carried out so far at the bench scale. It has included the following studies that defined and validated this PSA process both experimentally and via a PSA process model. First, a unique 3-bed 7-step PSA cycle schedule was developed for this CO2-N2 separation by performing PSA process simulations using the in-house Dynamic Adsorption Process Simulator (DAPS). To validate the results from DAPS, a number of different experiments were carried out that included measuring equilibrium and kinetic (mass transfer) data for both CO2 and N2 on 13X zeolite. This data was used in DAPS to validate it against PSA process experiments obtained from a unique 1-bed PSA apparatus that mimics all the steps of the 3-bed 7-step cycle. DAPS was able to predict the results from these 1-bed experiments without adjusting any of the model parameters. To validate the 3-bed 7-step PSA cycle schedule experiments were also carried out in a unique multi-bed PSA system. This set of experiments proved that the 3-bed 7-step PSA cycle could indeed meet the DOE requirements of producing 95% CO2 purity and 90% CO2 recovery from a 15% CO2 in N2 feed. Again, DAPS was able to predict the results from these 3-bed 7-step experiments without adjusting any of the model parameters. Overall, this work validated a unique PSA process at the bench scale for separating CO2 from the flue gas of a coal-fired power plant. This presentation will provide an overview of these experimental and modeling studies.
Rights
© 2016, Md. Atikur Rahman
Recommended Citation
Rahman, M.(2016). Development Of Pressure Swing Adsorption (PSA) Processor CO2 Capture From Flue Gas. (Doctoral dissertation). Retrieved from https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/etd/3426