It is increasingly recognized that high temperature Chemical Looping Combustion (CLC) is an energy efficient combustion technology for both gaseous and solid fuels that can potentially be utilized for power generation. This process also inherently produces a concentrated CO2 stream, thereby substantially reducing the costs of CO2 capture for geologic sequestration. The CLC system generally consists of two fluidized bed reactors, an air reactor and a fuel reactor. The fuel is oxidized in the fuel reactor by contacting hot granular metal oxides. There have been many experimental studies on CLC, however numerical simulations of CLC have been very few and none takes into consideration the optimization. For scale up and further development of CLC, multi-phase CFD simulations have a strong potential to suggest pathways for economical capture of CO2. An Eulerian multi-phase continuum model will be used to describe both the gas and solid phases (this model is available in commercial CFD software Fluent). Initially the CFD solutions will be validated against the available experimental data. Then a multi-objective genetic algorithm based optimizer will be integrated with the CFD solver. It will be used to optimize the concentration of released CO2 by changing the parameters such as superficial velocity, metal oxide concentration, reactor temperature etc. Such a capability currently does not exist anywhere and will have significant impact in determining the most economical and efficient approach for CO2 capture.
