Simulation of elevated temperature solid sorbent CO2 capture for pre-combustion applications using computational fluid dynamics

Abstract CO 2 adsorption is one of the warm gas cleanup technologies under development for integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC) applications. Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) can be a practical and powerful tool for reactor design for and optimization of the CO 2 adsorption process. In this present work, CFD simulation was developed in commercially available ANSYS Fluent software and validated for solid sorbent CO 2 capture to investigate pressure swing adsorption (PSA) for CO 2 separation from syngas with all the auxiliary operating steps. The adsorption equilibrium and kinetics were incorporated into ANSYS by user defined functions (UDFs) for source terms in Navier–Stokes equations. The CFD model well predicted the CO 2 breakthrough curve and temperature change. It was shown that in demo reactor operation, at the end of adsorption step, only half of the sorbent was loaded with CO 2 , while most of the loaded CO 2 was released during the desorption step. Further optimization of sorbent packing and cycle operation can be done with assistance of this CFD model to maximize bed loading, and used to design the commercial size reactors.