Experimental Demonstration of a Novel Gas Switching Combustion Reactor for Power Production with Integrated CO₂ Capture

This paper experimentally demonstrates the feasibility of a novel gas switching combustion (GSC) reactor as an alternative to the traditional chemical looping combustion (CLC) process for power production with integrated CO₂ capture. Whereas the CLC process circulates an oxygen carrier material between two fluidized bed reactors, where it is exposed to separate fuel and air streams, the GSC concept employs a single dense fluidized bed reactor where the oxygen carrier is periodically exposed to fuel and air streams. A lab-scale GSC reactor was operated autothermally (without any external temperature supply) to continuously convert cold feed gases into hot product gases, which would be suitable for driving a downstream power cycle. A parametric study was carried out to further investigate the behavior of the GSC concept. The reactor achieved a high CO₂ capture efficiency (97.2%) and purity (98.2%) even without the use of a purging stage between the oxidation and reduction stages. A small amount of carbon deposition (around 1%) had a slight negative effect on the CO₂ capture efficiency. Finally, the operation of a cluster of GSC reactors capable of delivering two steady process streams to downstream process equipment is discussed.