Performance of Oxygen Carriers with Different Porosities in Chemical Looping Water‐Splitting

Abstract

AbstractChemical looping is a novel process for clean energy conversion with CO2 capture. However, sintering of oxygen carriers is one of the important issues that hinders the development of chemical looping technology. Here we applied an air‐liquid foam templated sol‐gel method to produce anti‐sintering materials. By virtue of tunable sol precursors, we obtained a series of materials with different porous characteristics and found these initial textures could significantly affect the activity and stability of the materials in chemical looping. In the first cycle, materials with larger exposed surface had better reactivity. However, small pore closure and particle shrinkage occurred in the subsequent cycles. All of these factors contributed to the unstable nature of the materials, and the results suggested materials derived from templated sol solutions with more large pores were more robust during chemical looping. For other clean energy applications, we also hope the explored method can be extended to produce more materials with high reactivity and stability.