CLC by its nature does not require an air separation unit (ASU), which is a major user of auxiliary power that reduces overall plant efficiencies in many other low-emissions coal technologies. Chemical looping is a focus of development due to its comparatively high efficiency, low emissions, and nearly pure CO2 storage-ready flue gas.
CPFD Software LLC, the creators of the Barracuda® simulation package for particle-fluid systems, will be attending and presenting their technology at the 1st International Conference on Chemical Looping, to be held in Lyon, France, March 17-19, 2010.
The paper is to be presented by Dr. Dale Snider, the inventor of the CPFD® method, and is co-authored with Dr. Chris Guenther and Dr. Joshuah Dalton from the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory. The paper is entitled “CPFD Eulerian-Lagrangian Numerical Scheme Applied to Interconnected Fluidized Bed for Chemical Looping." The paper describes the modeling of a complete bench-top chemical looping process, quite possibly the first successful attempt at such a complete model.
Comparison of chemical looping simulation and experiment.
CPFD Software’s Barracuda software package was used for the analysis. Barracuda was chosen for this modeling because of its unique abilities for modeling three-dimensional particle-fluid flows. Though Barracuda is capable of modeling full thermodynamics and chemical reactions, the documented simulations were for a cold-flow Perspex looping experiment, and so were calculated under isothermal, non-reacting conditions. Good agreement between the experimental data and the simulation is shown.
Barracuda is used by major oil & gas, chemical, petrochemical, and power equipment manufacturers for simulating, understanding, and optimizing the operation of fluidized systems. Besides chemical looping combustion, common applications are FCC (fluidized catalytic cracking) reactors and regenerators, fluidized chemical reactors, CFB burners in coal-fired power plants, and both coal and biomass gasification reactors.
Barracuda is capable of modeling this equipment at lab scale, pilot scale and full production scale, providing an essential tool to assist in scaling up new processes to full production size and throughput. Using Barracuda, engineers can “peer inside” full scale reactors under actual operating conditions and understand how complex particle flow behavior impacts chemistry. Simulations in Barracuda allow engineers to capture and isolate key chemical, thermal, and momentum data unobtainable by any other means. This means that engineers now have the tool to finally answer the question “What is really going on in my chemical reactor and how can I improve the process?”
About CPFD Software
CPFD Software LLC is an Albuquerque-based company specializing in solving particle-gas and particle-liquid problems for the power, oil & gas, petrochemical, and chemical industries. Their Barracuda® software provides accurate simulations of lab-scale, pilot plant, and full-scale reacting bed flows with full thermodynamics and chemistry. CPFD’s clients include Global 500 oil & gas refiners, chemical manufacturers, and research organizations worldwide. CPFD Software is a member of PSRI.
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