A Novel CO2 Capture Process with High Flexibility and Productivity

It was aimed to design and optimize a CO2 capture adsorption process applicable to a large CO2 emitting source, to meet the targets of 95% CO2 purity and 90% CO2 recovery. It is also crucial that the designed adsorption process must spend less energy and incur less capital cost than a traditional chemical absorption process.
Various Vacuum Pressure Swing Adsorption (VPSA) processes have been designed to recover a high purity of CO2 from the flue gas. The VPSAs differ from each other in the number of beds or the step configuration of a cycle. By numerical simulation, the effects of the VPSA configuration on the performance were investigated. As a result, several Pareto curves are to be constructed for each VPSA design to show how CO2 purity and recovery, bed productivity and energy consumption are related with each other. The Pareto curves will be able to provide useful information such as whether or not each VPSA design can achieve the targets and how easily it can do so, i.e. in a wide range of operation conditions or in a very limited conditions only.
Ultimately, the designed VPSA must be able to cope with the varying feed flowrate to maintain the targeted performance, keeping the disruption incurred by the external disturbance under control. To this end, a novel VPSA design concept and its operational strategy are to be proposed.