Abstract

Chemical-looping combustion (CLC) is a next generation combustion technology that has shown great promise in addressing the need for high-efficiency low-cost carbon capture from fossil fueled power plants to address the rising carbon emissions. Although there have been a number of experimental studies on CLC in recent years, CFD simulations have been limited in the literature on CLC. The development and confidence in high-fidelity simulations of the CLC process is a necessary step towards facilitating the transition from laboratory-scale experiments to deployment of this technology on an industrial scale. In this research, first the CFD simulations of a CLC packed bed fuel reactor with ilmenite and carbon monoxide are conducted and compared with the experiments of Galucci; the simulations are performed for hot flow with chemical reactions simulating the exact experimental conditions. The previous simulations for this case were conducted for cold flow without chemical reactions. Simulations are performed for the entire sixty minutes of the experimental process and are in good agreement with the experimental data. The second simulation is conducted for a CLC bubbling bed reactor with hematite and methane corresponding to the experiment performed by Weber of NETL. Seventy-five thousand particles are injected to form the bed and the reactor model is sized to the scale to realize the bed height of the experiment. In order to simulate the bubbling phenomenon and fluid process from beginning to the steady combustion state, Discrete Element Method (DEM) is employed to determine the coordinate & velocity of every particle individually. The entire process is simulated reasonably well when compared to the experiment.

Committee Chair

Ramesh K. Agarwal

Committee Members

Qiulin Qu Swami Karunamoorthy

Comments

Permanent URL: https://doi.org/10.7936/K7X63MBR

Degree

Master of Science (MS)

Author's Department

Mechanical Engineering & Materials Science

Author's School

McKelvey School of Engineering

Document Type

Thesis

Date of Award

Fall 5-19-2017

Language

English (en)

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