A controllability analysis of a pilot‐scale CO2 capture plant using ionic liquids

Abstract

Nowadays there is a world concern on the impact and effect of large CO2 atmospheric concentrations on human health. Fossil‐fuel combustion processes in power plants are among the major contributors to this issue. Hence, it becomes important to develop new clean and sustainable processes aimed to reduce the amount of CO2 released to atmosphere by combustion processes in power plants. One of the best feasible manners to achieve this purposes lies in the use of a closed‐loop control system able to keep the amount of green‐house gases under specification even in the presence of unexpected scenarios. Of course, CO2 capture has been extensively researched in the past. However, in this regard the industrial practice has consisted in using Amines leading to sustainability and safety issues. Hence, it makes sense to seek for new and potentially environmental friendly process design to address CO2 reduction from power plants but applying a new type of sustainable stripping solvents. In this work we address the sustainable CO2 reduction issue from a process control point of view applying a previous design proposed by our research team based on the deployment of Ionic Liquids (IL) as potential green solvents and developing an efficient and decentralized multiloop control system. We demonstrate that the closed‐loop system is able to maintain the CO2 concentration levels under specification by testing in presence of several demanding scenarios. Overall, from an economic, sustainable and control point of view it looks feasible to replace the traditional amines‐based CO2 capture process by other alternatives based on the application of IL as potential green solvents. © 2016 American Institute of Chemical Engineers AIChE J, 62: 3298–3309, 2016