Carbon Capture, Utilisation and Storage (CCUS)-technologies offer considerable potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Oxy-fuel combustion is one of the most promising CCUS-technologies. In this process, fuel is burned with a mixture of oxygen and recirculated flue gas instead of air. This leads to a CO2 rich flue gas and enables efficient CO2 separation.
Combining the CCUS-technology with biomass as a primary energy source towards the Bioenergy Carbon Capture, Utilisation and Storage (BECCUS) process, net negative CO2 emissions can be achieved. Paving the way for such truly carbon sink technologies by a multi-scale research approach is the overall goal of the Collaborative Research Center CRC/TRR “Oxyflame”.
The replacement of air as oxidiser by a mixture of O2, CO2 and H2O leads to an entirely different combustion process. For Predictive Engineering, a detailed understanding and an accurate description of the combustion behaviour requires specific physical and chemical models for this special atmosphere.
To gain this detailed understanding and to provide more predictive simulation tools, the research goals of the Collaborative Research Center CRC/TRR “Oxyflame” are summarized as follows:
- Build comprehensive experimental data bases to improve our understanding and support mathematical modelling of single and coupled physical-chemical processes for solid fuel combustion in an oxy-fuel atmosphere,
- Develop reliable mathematical models based on fundamental knowledge of the involved processes and their dependence on parameters and boundary conditions ranging from micro scale to scale-interacting phenomena
- Develop an accurate simulation framework (OxySim-129) for design of burners and combustion chambers of power plants for oxy-fuel combustion.
In the Collaborative Research Center CRC/TRR “Oxyflame” scientists from RWTH Aachen, Ruhr University Bochum, and Technical University of Darmstadt develop chemical and physical models to fundamentally describe reaction kinetics, multi-phase flows and heat transfer in oxy-fuel combustion processes. These models are based on comprehensive data and technical expertise from experimental investigations within this research center.
The models will provide a knowledge base for an engineering tool (OxySim-129) to enable predictive engineering of burners and boilers for solid fuel combustion in an oxy-fuel atmosphere. This reduces the time frame for power plant development by achieving larger scale-up steps and a reduced number of experimental validation steps.
CRC/Transregio 129 "Oxyflame" has been funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) – project number 215035359.