OP-II-3

PP-I-48CFD SIMULATION OF AN ABSORPTION COLUMN FOR A CO 2CAPTURING PROCESSPremalatha M., Kumar G.Centre for Energy and Environmental Science and Technology, Department ofChemical Engineering, National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirappalli -620015,Tamil Nadu, IndiaReduction of greenhouse gases is an important mitigation effort in the midst ofrising global temperatures. This report is focused on the capture of CO 2 from flue gasemitted by a coal fired power plant. From available technologies, post combustioncapture with chemical absorption is chosen, because this technology looks to beready for retrofitting in the power plant. This approach is made towards the simulationof the process using computational fluid dynamic software. The CFD software used isFLUENT 6.3.26.The absorption column is designed in GAMBIT by taking the dimensions of 8mheight and 1m diameter of packing column and is exported to the FLUENT. InFLUENT, by specifying boundary and operating conditions (temperature, pressure,fluid flow models, flow rates, and porosity, iterations are done till the all the equationsconverge. Also, simulations were carried out for various porosities, liquid flow ratesand gas flow rates to study the effect of CO 2 recovery. The variation in exit CO 2concentration with respect to the operating conditions are examined and optimized.The simulated column showed CO 2 recovery of about 90% for a porosity=0.6, liquidflow rate 3.2kg/s and gas flow rate 1kg/s.Key words: CO 2, absorption column, post combustion, FLUENT, porosity306