Power plants constitute one of the largest CO2 emitting sectors. With increased emphasis on abatement of emissions to meet the 2030 deadline set by the UK Committee on Climate Change, the power-plant sector is relying on CCS retrofits using post-combustion capture to clean up flue gases. However, despite the highly transient nature of power plant operation characterised by frequent shut-downs and start-ups (up to twice a day), the retrofits are currently designed for a constant base-load operation and hence cannot maintain even liquid distribution during unsteady loading.
This project, TRANSPACC, is envisaged to move beyond the current concepts for making CO2 absorption column internals at base-load operation and towards new column internals capable to meet the requirements for fast, flexible and highly dynamic operation of fossil-fuel power plants fitted with CO2 capture. This proposal concerns with modelling and simulating the transient absorption phenomena in towers with structured packings using 3D direct numerical simulations (DNS). The work proposed complements the experimental investigations in the TRANSPACC-Experimental project, led by Dr. Mathieu Lucquiaud (University of Edinburgh).
