(395m) Evaluation of Dry Sorbents On 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 sorption-enhanced water-gas shift (SEWGS) technology that combines water-gas-shift (WGS) reaction with CO₂ capture using dry sorbents for coal gasification systems. 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 CO₂adsorption at high temperature, be regenerated at high pressure, and maintain high multi-cycle stability.

Our thermodynamic studies identified several sorbent candidates that possess properties desirable for the SEWGS application. Selected candidate sorbents were synthesized using a flame spray pyrolysis method and characterized using different techniques.  Multiple cyclic CO₂ adsorption and regeneration performance were evaluated for the sorbents using a TGA at atmosphere pressure. Several sorbents demonstrated high CO₂ adsorption capacity, fast kinetics, and multi-cyclic stability at temperatures ranging between 400 and 700 °C. The performance of selected sorbents is further being evaluated for the SEWGS reaction using a high temperature, high pressure (HTHPR) reactor. This paper will present the recent results of the sorbent synthesis and performance evaluation using the TGA and HTHPR.