Impact of blends of aqueous amines on absorber intercooling for post combustion CO2 capture system

Abstract

Climate change is the biggest challenge of this century due to the global consequences of human activities on the ecosystem resulting in global warming. The emissions of greenhouse gases, mainly CO2 from the combustion of fossil fuels in the power plant is the main cause of global warming and to mitigate these emissions is the foremost challenge. Nowadays, the most preferred method is post combustion chemical absorption using amine-based solvents. However, high energy requirements for this method restrict its deployment. An efficient approach used for the reduction of the high energy requirement of post combustion CO2 capture process was absorber intercooling. Therefore, this research evaluates the effect of two configurations of intercooled absorber such as “simple” and “advanced” intercoolers for CO2 capture integrated with natural gas combined cycle power plant using aqueous alkanolamines, such as 30 wt.% monoethanolamine and 50 wt.% methyl-diethanolamine and their blends. For pure methyl-diethanolamine case, at lean loading 0.01 intercooling configurations; simple and advanced shows the highest reduction of 21.01% and 22.82% in the specific reboiler duty, respectively in comparison to other blends at the expense of highest liquid solvent flow rate. Simple and advanced intercooling configurations shows optimum results for the case with 40% monoethanolamine and 60% methyl-diethanolamine in a blend with decrease of 9.19% and 17.28% in solvent flow rate and a decrease of 9.42% and 16.83% in specific reboiler duty required for 90% CO2 capture rate, respectively. For pure monoethanolamine case at lean loading 0.2 absorber intercooling does not offer significant results.