| Fossil fuels provide approximately 80% of the world's energy demands. Methods for reducing CO2 emissions resulting from fossil fuels include increasing the efficiency of power plants and production processes, decreasing energy demands, in combination with CO2 capture and long term storage (CCS).;CO2 capture technologies include post-combustion, pre-combustion, and oxyfuel combustion. The amine-based post-combustion CO2 capture from a coal-fired power plant was studied in this thesis.;In case of post-combustion capture, CO2 can be captured by Monoethanolamine solvent (MEA), a primary ethanolamine. MEA can associate with H3O+ to form an ion MEAH+, and can react with CO2 to form a carbonate ion MEACOO-. Commercial code ASPEN Plus was used to simulate the process of CO2 capture and optimize the process parameters and required energy duty. The major part of thermal energy requirement is from the Absorber and Stripper columns. This suggests that process optimization should focus on the Absorption/Desorption process.;Optimization results show that the gas-liquid reaction equilibrium is affected by several operating parameters including solvent flow rate, stream temperature, column operating pressure, flue gas composition, solvent concentration and absorber design. With optimized CO2 capture, the energy consumption for solvent regeneration (reboiler thermal duty) was decreased from 5.76 GJ/ton captured CO2 to 4.56 GJ/t CO2.;On the other hand, the cost of CO2 capture (and sequestration) could be reduced by limiting size of the Absorber column and operating pressure. |
