Synthesis of Optimal Adsorptive Carbon Capture Processes

Solid sorbent carbon capture systems have the potential to require significantly lower regeneration energy compared to aqueous monoethanol amine (MEA) systems. To date, the majority of work on solid sorbents has focused on developing the sorbent materials themselves. In order to advance these technologies, it is necessary to design systems that can exploit the full potential and unique characteristics of these materials.

The Department of Energy (DOE) recently initiated the Carbon Capture Simulation Initiative (CCSI) to develop computational tools to accelerate the commercialization of carbon capture technology. Solid sorbents is the first Industry Challenge Problem considered under this initiative. An early goal of the initiative is to demonstrate a superstructure-based framework to synthesize an optimal solid sorbent carbon capture process. For a given solid sorbent, there are a number of potential reactors and reactor configurations consisting of various fluidized bed reactors, moving bed reactors, and fixed bed reactors. Detailed process models for these reactors have been modeled using Aspen Custom Modeler; however, such models are computationally intractable for large optimization-based process synthesis. Thus, in order to facilitate the use of these models for process synthesis, we have developed an approach for generating simple algebraic surrogate models that can be used in an optimization formulation. This presentation will describe the superstructure formulation which uses these surrogate models to choose among various process alternatives and will describe the resulting optimal process configuration.