High Performance CO2 Adsorbents for Sorption-Enhanced Water Gas Shift Reaction (SEWGS) In Coal Gasification Systems

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and URS Group, Inc. are developing a dry sorbent technology that combines the water-gas-shift (WGS) reaction with CO₂ removal for coal gasification systems. The result will be a sorption-enhanced water-gas shift (SEWGS) technology. The key to the success of the SEWGS technology is to identify and develop highly efficient, highly stable sorbents with properties suitable for CO₂ capture at high pressure and high temperature syngas conditions. An ideal SEWGS sorbent will improve WGS efficiency, achieve high capacity of CO₂ adsorption at high temperature, be regenerated at high pressure, and maintain high multi-cycle stability.

Our previous thermodynamic modeling and process simulation studies identified seven sorbent candidates that possess properties desirable for SEWGS application. The current work is focused on synthesis research of these sorbent candidates using a flame spray pyrolysis (FSP) approach. Adsorption and regeneration behaviors of FSP sorbents are evaluated using TGA and several sorbents demonstrated high CO₂ adsorption performance (capacity and kinetics) at temperatures ranging between 400 and 700 °C and good multi-cycle stability. This presentation will provide a summary of the sorbent synthesis and evaluation research.