A Study on the Role of Reaction Modeling in Multi-phase CFD-based Simulations of Chemical Looping Combustion

A Study on the Role of Reaction Modeling in Multi-phase CFD-based Simulations of Chemical Looping Combustion - Chemical Looping Combustion is an energy efficient combustion technology for the inherent separation of carbon dioxide for both gaseous and solid fuels. For scale up and further development of this process multi-phase CFD-based simulations have a strong potential which rely on kinetic models for the solid/gaseous reactions. Reaction models are usually simple in structure in order to keep the computational cost low. They are commonly derived from thermogravimetric experiments. With only few CFD-based simulations performed on chemical looping combustion, there is a lack in understanding of the role and of the sensitivity of the applied chemical reaction model on the outcome of a simulation. The aim of this investigation is therefore the study of three different carrier materials CaSO4, Mn3O4 and NiO with the gaseous fuels H-2 and CH4 in a batch type reaction vessel. Four reaction models namely the linear shrinking core, the spherical shrinking core, the Avrami-Erofeev and a recently proposed multi parameter model are applied and compared on a case by case basis.