The Impact of Design Correlations on Rate-based Modeling of a Large Scale CO2 Capture with MEA

Abstract

Hydrodynamics and mass transfer correlations for the design of structured packed columns have been studied in order to compare the effect of different design correlations on the rate-based modeling of a large scale CO2 capture process with a chemical solvent. The commonly used correlations like the Bravo et al.,[1] and Billet and Schultes [2] were applied in this study for the prediction of mass transfer in an absorber column. Two cases are considered: absorption of CO2 from a gas-fired power plant (430 MWe) and absorption of CO2 from a coal-fired power plant (800 MWe). In this work a scale-up analysis with respect to the effect of correlations used on the performance of the system for CO2 capture with MEA was done within the Aspen RateSep simulator. The study showed that there is significant uncertainty associated with applying the proposed correlations for large scale packed columns for capturing CO2 from gas-fired and coal-fired power plants. The height of packed column varies in both gas-fired and coal-fired power plants with the selected correlations. It was found that there is more uncertainty in using the selected correlations for absorption of CO2 from gas fired power plant compared to a coal-fired power plant because of the lower CO2 concentration. The differences are caused by both the mass transfer and the effective interfacial area models.