(134c) Performance Characterization of CO2 Capture Materials On Flue Gas Slip Streams

A significant amount of U.S. research and development is currently focused on technologies for mitigating the rate of increase of atmospheric CO₂ concentration.  The need for cost-effective separation of CO₂ from combustion exhaust is fundamental to achieving market penetration of CO₂ capture and storage technologies.  These technologies will facilitate continued use of hydrocarbon energy resources such as coal and biomass while substantially reducing their contribution to atmospheric CO₂ concentration.  Development and testing of CO₂ separation technologies and processes necessarily spans a broad range of scale requiring increasingly representative cycle configuration, gas composition, and process hardware throughout the development process.  Accurately quantifying key material performance parameters and interactions as early as possible allows decisions on continued investment to be made with higher confidence and at lower cost.  Flexible, continuous-scale test hardware and methods using actual flue gas streams play a key role after initial laboratory-scale batch testing and prior to large, costly engineering-scale testing.

This paper will present results of CO₂ capture material testing performed using an automated, dual-bed adsorption system for the evaluation of solid adsorbent materials.  The mobile system was used to characterize material performance over a large number of loading and regeneration cycles in two configurations: Using bottled gases in a laboratory environment and with a flue gas slip stream from a 500 MW coal fired power plant.  Baseline testing was performed on zeolite 13X using both thermal swing and vacuum swing regeneration.  Automated adsorption and regeneration cycles, combined with an integrated data acquisition system, provide the ability to accumulate a large number of  cycles and characterize material performance over long periods of operation.  Performance trends and sensitivities will be discussed.

Having completed this baseline material testing, the test hardware and methods will be used to characterize performance of other sorbents with potential to reduce the incremental cost of electricity associated with flue gas CO₂ capture relative to zeolite 13X.  A solvent test cart developed in parallel with the sorbent test cart will provide a similar characterization capability for liquid solvents.