Modeling of stripper configurations for CO₂ capture using aqueous piperazine

textThis thesis seeks to improve the economic viability of carbon capture process by reducing the energy requirement of amine scrubbing technology. High steam requirement for solvent regeneration in this technology can be reduced by improvements in the regeneration process. Solvent models based on experimental results have been created by previous researchers and are available for simulation and process modeling in Aspen Plus®. Standard process modeling specifications are developed and multiple regeneration processes are compared for piperazine (a cyclic diamine) in Chapter 2. The configurations were optimized to identify optimal operating conditions for energy performance. These processes utilize methods of better heat recovery and effective separation and show 2 to 8% improvement in energy requirement as compared to conventional absorber-stripper configuration. The best configuration is the interheated stripper which requires equivalent work of 29.9 kJ/mol CO₂ compared to 32.6 kJ/mol CO₂ for the simple stripper. The Fawkes and Independence solvent models were used for modeling and simulation. A new regeneration configuration called the advanced flash stripper (patent pending) was developed and simulated using the Independence model. Multiple complex levels of the process were simulated and results show more than 10% improvement in energy performance. Multiple cases of operating conditions and process specifications were simulated and the best case requires equivalent work of 29 kJ/mol CO₂. This work also includes modeling and simulation of pilot plant campaigns carried out for demonstration of a piperazine with a 2-stage flash on at 1 tpd CO₂. Reconciliation of data was done in Aspen Plus for solvent model validation. The solvent model predicted results consistent with the measured values. A systematic error of approximately +5% was found in the rich CO₂, that can be attributed to laboratory measurement errors, instrument measurement errors, and standard deviation in solvent model data. Stripper Modeling for CO₂ capture from natural gas combustion was done under a project by TOTAL through the Process Science and Technology Center. Two configurations were simulated for each of three flue gas conditions (corresponding to 3%, 6% and 9% CO₂). Best cases for the three conditions of flue gas require 34.9, 33.1 and 31.6 kJ/mol CO₂.Chemical Engineerin