Review of reactor for chemical looping combustion of solid fuels

Chemical Looping Combustion (CLC) is one of the important techniques used to combine fuel combustion and almost pure CO2 production. Significant progress has been made with respect to the utilization of solid fuels in CLC in the last ten years. The key technical challenges of using solid fuels in CLC involve several aspects: reducing unburnt volatiles and gasification products escaping out of fuel reactor, enhancing solid fuel conversion in fuel reactor and minimizing char slip to air reactor, and ash handling. These aspects are closely related to reaction kinetics of oxygen carriers in particulate systems as well as the design and operation of CLC reactors which are widely accepted as interconnected fluidized beds. In this study, an overview of reactor of CLC using solid fuels is given. Detailed descriptions of the bed types and configurations of air reactor, fuel reactor and carbon stripper are illustrated in industrial scale. The available operating experience in the fields of energy and chemical engineering such as deciding solid fuel feeding position and bed internals is demonstrated to address the existing operational problems.