OS3A-5:FIXED BED REACTOR DESIGN: AN OPPORTUNITY TO APPLY THE CLATHRATE PROCESS FOR CARBON DIOXIDE CAPTURE AND DESALINATION APPLICATIONS

Ponnivalavan BABU 1, Rajnish KUMAR2, Praveen LINGA 1
1. Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, National University of Singapore, Singapore; 2. Chemical Engineering and Process Development Division, National Chemical Laboratory, Pune, India

    In the past two decades, gas hydrates has been proposed for many technological applciations like natural gas storage and transport, carbon dioxide capture storage/sequestration, desalination, cool storage, hydrogen storage and several other gas separation applications. While it has been shown that hydrate process is technically and economically feasible, it has not yet been commercialized in any of these applications to the exception of natural gas storage which is in the pilot scale testing. One major bottle neck in realizing the hydrate technology as a prospect has been the slow kinetics of hydrate formation and the high process costs. There has been several fundamental studies in the literature recently focusing on finding addtives to lower operating pressures for CO2 capture. Recently, we have made significant progress in enhancing the formation kinetics by employing a fixed bed configuration and have found that the interstitial pore space of the porous media is important for this fixed bed configuration. Based on our findings, we have identified a well connected interstitial pore space containing porous media that can convert about 60% water to hydrates in one hour. Our study presents an opportunity to scale up the HBGS process for CO2 capture. We propose a single stage four step HBGS process for pre-combustion capture of carbon dioxide. Finally, we will also present new data on how our fixed bed approach coupled with a special guest gas can be employed for desalination of seawater.