5 th International Conference on Experiments/Process/System Modeling/Simulation/Optimization 5 th IC-EpsMsO Athens, 3-6 July, 2013 © IC-EpsMsO TWO-PHASE GAS-LIQUID REACTING FLOW IN POROUS MEDIA Dariusz Asendrych 1 , Pawel Niegodajew 1 , Stanislaw Drobniak 1 , Adam Tatarczuk * 1 Czestochowa University of Technology, Institute of Thermal Machinery al. Armii Krajowej 21, 42-200 Czestochowa, Poland e-mail: imc@imc.pcz.czest.pl , web page: http://www.imc.pcz.pl * Institute of Chemical Processing of Coal, Centre for Process Studies ul. Zamkowa 1, 41-803 Zabrze, Poland e-mail: office@ichpw.zabrze.pl , web page: http://www.ichpw.zabrze.pl Keywords: carbon capture & storage (CCS), multiphase flow, chemical absorption, porous media, CFD Abstract. The paper is devoted to CFD modelling of the CO 2 capture from flue gases with the use of chemical absorption. The model incorporates various physico-chemical submodels, in particular Eulerian countercurrent 2-phase gas-liquid flow in porous media, chemical reaction of CO 2 absorption/desorption combined with heat release/consumption, inter-phase heat transfer and the water evaporation/condensation phenomena. The special attention has been put on flow hydrodynamics in porous region, where a flow resistance and a liquid holdup have to be modelled with special care. Moreover, a flow redistribution model has been adopted in a porous region in order to adequately reconstruct liquid behaviour due to the geometry constraints of packed bed filling elements. Due to high complexity of the model, its development and testing has been performed with the use of a number of simplified models. Test simulations have shown a good agreement with experimental data acquired at the reference pilot CCS installation proving the model relevance and its usefulness to industrial applications. 1 INTRODUCTION The care about the environment enforces the reduction of greenhouse gases emission, in particular the significant cuts in carbon dioxide being released from power industry. Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) is regarded as the most efficient solution for the near future allowing to achieve the CO 2 emission targets. Among the available CCS technologies the "post-combustion" capture seems to be the most promising for implementation into industrial practice in relatively short time [9] . The remaining two CCS methods, i.e. "pre- combustion capture" and "oxy-fuel combustion" [18] require more research efforts and higher investments before their introduction into power industry. The present paper is devoted to the post combustion capture which can be easily adopted to the existing power plant installations operated on different kinds of fossil fuels. Its implementation requires to build the CCS unit and to integrate it with the power plant cycle. The principle of operation of capture unit is presented in Fig. 1. Flue gases are sent through the absorber where carbon dioxide is captured by chemical absorption with the use of aqueous monoethanolamine (MEA) solution supplied to the column at its top. Both phases pass through the packed bed where the most of the chemical reaction occurs due to the enlarged contact area between phases. The loaded MEA (containing absorbed CO 2 ) solution is pre-heated before entering the desorber (stripper) where, with the help of additional heat, the carbon dioxide is released, then sent to the compression unit and transported to the storage location. The recycled MEA then flows through the heat exchanger (improving process efficiency) and finally enters the absorber being ready for the next capture cycle. MEA is the most common choice of chemical Figure 1. The process flow diagram for CO 2 capture in a post-combustion method