A two carriers reactor configuration for chemical-looping combustion in a packed-bed

Abstract

•A numerical model of a Chemical Looping Combustion (CLC) fixed bed reactors network for CH4 combustion is developed and studied in the present paper. The network is based on a parallel arrangement of couples of reactors in series. For every couple, the first reactor is filled with a Cu-based oxygen carrier (OC) while the second one exploits a Ni-based OC. The developed model allows to evaluate the performances of the proposed system in terms of both generated thermal power and flow and composition of the gaseous output streams.•For the same bed length and cross-sectional area, the proposed two-stage CLC reactor has similar performances to a single carrier one in terms of outlet gas temperature, allowing however for shorter cycle times and requiring a lower amount of active phases contents with respect to this latter. Moreover, fewer units to be arranged in the network are required for the proposed two-stage CLC system than the single-stage one.