Hybrid membrane process for post-combustion CO2 capture from coal-fired power plant

Post-combustion CO2 capture is a promising way to reduce CO2 emissions at the coal-fired power plants. Even though several studies have been conducted regarding a wide variety of CO2 capture techniques, gas separation membrane process has shown potential as an energy-efficient, low-cost CO2 capture option. However, most of the previous researches focused only on CO2-selective membrane, and there's limited literature about the application of N2-selective membrane. In this study, both CO2-selective and N2-selective membranes are considered and relevant issues regarding the CO2-selective membrane, such as pressure ratio, attainability, and multistage configuration, are studied and extended to the N2-selective membrane. Polaris® membrane is served as a typical CO2-selective membrane; on the other hand, membrane properties of N2-selective membrane with selectivity up to 200 are considered. Hybrid membrane process applying both CO2- and N2-selective membranes for capturing at least 90% CO2 from a typical 550 MW subcritical coal-fired power plant is designed, simulated and analyzed using Aspen Plus® simulation software. The optimization and economic analysis are also applied with the cost factor defined in this work, which is a comprehensive index to evaluate the applicability of the membrane, including permeance, membrane lifetime and membrane price. The results reveal the relationship between the optimal design variables and membrane properties. Moreover, the selectivity-limited region is identified, which leads to two different dominant strategies for the cost reduction in a different region, either by the increase in selectivity or the reduction of the cost factor. © 2020 Elsevier B.V.