Exergy Analysis of a Syngas-Fueled Combined Cycle with Chemical-Looping Combustion and CO2 Sequestration

Fossil fuels are still widely used for power generation. Nevertheless, it is possible to attain a short- and medium-term substantial reduction of greenhouse gas emissions to the atmosphere through a sequestration of the CO2 produced in fuels’ oxidation. The chemical-looping combustion (CLC) technique is based on a chemical intermediate agent, which gets oxidized in an air reactor and is then conducted to a separated fuel reactor, where it oxidizes the fuel in turn. Thus, the oxidation products CO2 and H2O are obtained in an output flow in which the only non-condensable gas is CO2, allowing the subsequent sequestration of CO2 without an energy penalty. Furthermore, with shrewd configurations, a lower exergy destruction in the combustion chemical transformation can be achieved. This paper focus on a second law analysis of a CLC combined cycle power plant with CO2 sequestration using syngas from coal and biomass gasification as fuel. The key thermodynamic parameters are optimized via the exergy method. The proposed power plant configuration is compared with a similar gas turbine system with a conventional combustion, finding a notable increase of the power plant efficiency. Furthermore, the influence of syngas composition on the results is investigated by considering different H2-content fuels