Technical Evaluation of a Chemical Looping Combustor Fed With Biofuels And Its Integration With a Gas Turbine

Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS) technologies are fundamental to absorb CO2 from the atmosphere and store it underground. A way to develop such kind of technologies is that to couple a pressurized chemical looping combustor to a turbo expander. The typical configuration chosen is to have an air reactor and a fuel reactor based on coupled circulating fluidized beds. The fluidization regime in the fuel reactor is bubbling, while the fluidization regime in the air reactor is fast. To design the two reactors Aspen Plus software was used, given that the new version has a module for fluidized bed modeling. At first the oxygen carrier has been designed ex novo, given that it is a composite compound, mainly made by nickel oxide freeze granulated on alumina (Ni40Al-FG), the molecular structure has been inserted in Aspen Plus. Then based on the power of the gas turbine the mass flow of evolved fluid (in this case depleted air) is calculated using Aspen Plus. The fuel reactor is modelled inserting the reduction reactions for nickel based oxygen carrier.