IR monitoring of absorbent composition and degradation during pilot plant operation
- Authors: Puxty, Graeme , Bennett, Robert , Conway, Will , Webster-Gardiner, Mike , Yang, Qi , Pearson, Pauline , Cottrell, Aaron , Huang, Sanger , Feron, Paul , Reynolds, Alicia , Verheyen, Vincent
- Date: 2020
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Industrial and Engineering Chemistry Research Vol. 59, no. 15 (2020), p. 7080-7086
- Full Text: false
- Reviewed:
- Description: The monitoring of the absorbent during the operation of CO2 separation processes is a necessary and challenging task. The most common absorbent used is an aqueous amine solution. Traditional approaches to analysis such as titration and chromatography are time-consuming and only provide limited information. This hinders the ability of process operators to rapidly respond to changes in operating conditions. In this work, a combination of infrared (IR) spectroscopy and principle component regression (PCR) analyses have been demonstrated as a rapid and reliable technique to determine the composition of an absorbent during a pilot plant campaign at a brown coal power station. The concentration of amine, a degradation product, CO2, and water was monitored throughout the campaign by a method that provided results in minutes. The results were verified by independent sample analysis using acid-base titration, high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC), and 13C NMR spectroscopy. It was necessary to use spectral windowing when building the IR-PCR model, but this resulted in a robust and reliable method that has been demonstrated to work in a real-world process environment. © 2019 American Chemical Society.
- Description: The authors wish to acknowledge the financial assistance provided by the Brown Coal Innovation Australia, Ltd., a private member-based company with funding contracts through the Australian National Low Emissions Coal Research and Development, Ltd. (ANLEC R&D) and the Victorian State Government. The work described here was made possible through the PICA project, a collaboration between AGL Loy Yang, IHI, and CSIRO that aims to advance post-combustion CO 2 -capture technology in Australia.
Oxidative degradation of amine absorbents in carbon capture systems – A dynamic modelling approach
- Authors: Dickinson, Jillian , Percy, Andrew , Puxty, Graeme , Verheyen, Vincent
- Date: 2016
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: International Journal of Greenhouse Gas Control Vol. 53, no. (2016), p. 391-400
- Full Text: false
- Reviewed:
- Description: Fossil fuels are used widely for energy production and are likely to continue to play a major role world wide for many years to come. Much work has been done on the technology for capturing CO2 from gaseous industrial effluent. For large-scale applications like coal or natural gas-fired power plants, using amine solvents to capture post-combustion CO2 is the most mature CO2 capture technology. This technique can be used to retrofit existing plants by treating the flue gas after combustion. This paper details a dynamic mathematical model for the absorber column constructed from first principles. The loss of MEA through oxidative degradation has been quantified here for the first time and this is currently not possible using commercial packages. Reaction rate kinetics have been employed to predict the accumulation of oxidation products which is limited by the incomplete knowledge of the dominant reactions between O2 and MEA. When research has produced more detailed information about the products formed during this oxidation, it can be inserted easily into the model. Validation has been performed using data from the CSIRO PCC pilot plant at AGL Loy Yang. A limited parametric study of the impact of operating conditions on oxidation was performed.