Numerical simulation of chemical looping combustion process with CaSO4 oxygen carrier

Chemical-looping combustion (CLC) is a promising technology for the combustion of gas or solid fuel with efficient use of energy and inherent separation of CO2. The technique involves the use of an oxygen carrier which transfers oxygen from combustion air to the fuel, and hence a direct contact between air and fuel is avoided. A chemical-looping combustion system consists of a fuel reactor and an air reactor. A metal oxide is used as oxygen carrier that circulates between the two reactors. The air reactor is a high velocity fluidized bed where the oxygen carrier particles are transported together with the air stream to the top of the air reactor, where they are then transferred to the fuel reactor using a cyclone. The fuel reactor is a bubbling fluidized bed reactor where oxygen carrier particles react with hydrocarbon fuel and get reduced. The reduced oxygen carrier particles are transported back to the air reactor where they react with oxygen in the air and are oxidized back to metal oxide. The exhaust from the fuel reactor mainly consists of CO2 and water vapor. After condensation of the water in the exit gas from the fuel reactor, the remaining CO2 gas is compressed and cooled to yield liquid CO2, which can be disposed of in various ways.With the improvement of numerical methods and more advanced hardware technology, the time needed to run CFD (Computational fluid dynamics) codes is decreasing. Hence multiphase CFD-based models for dealing with complex gas-solid hydrodynamics and chemical reactions are becoming more accessible. Until now there were a few literatures about mathematical modeling of chemical-looping combustion using CFD approach. In this work, the reaction kinetics model of the fuel reactor (CaSO4 + H2) was developed by means of the commercial code FLUENT. The bubble formation and the relation between bubble formation and molar fraction of products in gas phase were well captured by CFD simulation. Computational results from the simulation also showed low fuel conversion rate. The conversion of H2 was about 34% partially due to fast, large bubbles rising through the reactor, low bed temperature and large particles diameter.