Process design optimization strategy to develop energy and cost correlations of CO2 capture processes

• Approach for preliminary design and evaluation of CO2 capture in power plants.
• Development of parameterized models for CO2 capture by chemical absorption.
• Energy and cost correlations to predict CO2 capture performance.
• Computation time reduction in optimization of complex integrated energy systems.
• Reduction of decision variables in global problem multi-objective optimization.

In the context of CO2 emissions reduction from power plants, CO2 removal from flue gas by chemical absorption with monoethanolamine is analyzed in detail. By applying process integration and multi-objective optimization techniques the influence of the operating conditions on the thermo-economic performance and on the optimal thermal integration within a power plant is studied. With the aim of performing optimization of complex integrated energy systems, simpler parameterized models of the CO2 capture process are developed. These models predict the optimized thermo-economic performances with regard to the capture rate, flue gas flowrate and CO2 concentration. When applied to overall process optimization, the optimization time is considerably reduced without penalizing the overall power plant model quality. This approach is promising for the preliminary design and evaluation of process options including a CO2 capture unit.