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A publication of

CHEMICAL ENGINEERING TRANSACTIONS

The Italian Association
VOL. 70, 2018 Chemical Engineering
Online at www.aidic.it/cet

Guest Editors: Timothy G. Walmsley, Petar S. Varbanov, Rongxin Su, Jiÿí J. Klemeš
Copyright © 2018, AIDIC Servizi Srl
ISBN 978-88-95608-67-9; ISSN 2283-9216 DOI: 10.3303/CET1870126

Simulation and Optimization Study on Aqueous MEA-Based

CO2 Capture Process
Liheng Guoa , Yudong Dinga,*, Xiaoqiang Lia , Xun Zhua , Qiang Liaoa, Shaojun Yuanb
aChongqing Univ., Key Laboratory of Low-grade Energy Utilization Technologies and Systems, Shazheng St.174,
Shapingba Dist., Chongqing 400030, China
bSichuan Univ., School of Chemical Engineering, No.24 South Section 1, Yihuan Road Chengdu 610065, Sichuan, China
dingyudong@cqu.edu.cn

Chemical absorption with monoethanolamine (MEA) is the most common technology used in the CO2 removal unit
for a power plant. Howeverÿthe application is hindered by its high energy consumption for absorbent
regeneration. In this study, a rate-based model of the typical MEA-based CO2 capture process was built for a power
plant with Aspen Plus software. The thermodynamic model of ENRTL-RK was adopted. Temperature fields and the
flow rates changes of components in absorb and stripper were obtained. And process analysis using the equilibrium
stage model was performed to investigate the effects of operation parameters (CO2 loading in lean solution and
stripper pressure) on the regeneration energy consumption. With heat pump technology adopted to assist lean
solution regeneration, two processes were proposed and the reboiler duties decreased
to 2.77 GJ/t CO2 and 2.38 GJ/t CO2, respectively, owing to the recovery of latent heat and part of sensible heat.
Furthermore, condenser duties were obviously reduced.

1.Introduction
A large increase in CO2 concentration in the atmosphere is believed to be a chief factor that has caused the
greenhouse effect and global climate change, which has been raised global concern (Bryce et al., 2015). The
combustion of fossil fuels in generating station is one of the primary contributors. And in the near future, fossil fuels
will continue to play a main role in the energy supply. CO2 capture technology was proposed as one of
promising ways to reduce and control CO2 emission (Ding et al., 2016). As the simple process flow and operation,
chemical absorption technology is considered as an ideal method. However, the wide application of solvent-based
post-combustion CO2 capture technology is hindered by its high energy consumption for absorbent regeneration and
capital cost. According to literature data, installing a capture process for an existing coal-fired power plant would
raise the generating cost by 80% and decrease generating capacity by 30% (DOE/NETL, 2010).

To reduce the energy consumption and the electric efficiency penalty, many efforts on solvent-based CO2
capture technology have been made. One of the focuses is developing novel absorbents that possess more efficient
capture performance and are more energy-saving than monoethanolamine (MEA), such as mixed amine solution
(Mehassouel et al., 2016), ionic liquids (Jing et al., 2018) , and porous liquid (James, 2016). But MEA solution has
been regarded as a comment solvent in practical industrial application due to its low cost, fast reaction rate and rich
industrial experience. In addition, the optimization of operational parameters and process configuration for CO2
capture system also attracts the attention of researchers. Based on the conventional amine-based CO2 capture
configuration, a 0.4 GJ/t CO2 decrease of reboiler duty was obtained after the optimization of operational parameters,
such as CO2 loading in lean solution, temperature of lean solution and stripper pressure, and economic evaluation
was carried out out (Li et al., 2016). A thermodynamic model of the CO2 capture process was derived by Zhang et
al. (2015) to analyze the mechanism and potential of energy saving. By comparing with a reboiler based stripper, an
interheated stripper and a flash stripper, Lin et al. (2014) obtained the best energy performance from the stripper
with a warm rich bypass and a rich exchanger bypass. Heat pump system is an economical and efficient way to
perform heat recovery (Walmsley et al., 2017). The utilization of heat pump for CO2 capture would effectively reduce
regeneration energy consumption (Kansha et al., 2009).

Please cite this article as: Guo L., Ding Y., Li X., Zhu X., Liao Q., Yuan S., 2018, Simulation and optimization study on aqueous mea-based co2
capture process, Chemical Engineering Transactions, 70 , 751-756 DOI:10.3303/CET1870126
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Using flash evaporation and thermal vapor compression to reduce heat consumption of CO2 capture processes,
Zhang et al. (2014) indicated that the proposed CO2 capture system reduced the specific heat consumption from
4.421 GJ/t CO2 to 4.161 GJ/t CO2. An innovative process proposed by Yu et al. (2009) recovered the waste
heat of flue gas and inter-stage compression, with the energy consumption decreasing to 2.75 GJ/t CO2.
However, although various CO2 capture processes have been presented and optimized aiming to minimize the
heat energy penalty, most of them still belong to energy intensive processes due to solvent regeneration and
there is still a long way to the target of 2 MJ/kg CO2 ( Song et al., 2017). Furthermore, cooling duty is relatively
less considered in the previous studies. Therefore, more work should be carried out on process optimization.
The objective of this study is to design a novel CO2 capture process with heat integration considering both heat
and cooling energy consumptions. In this study, a rigorous and rate-based model of aqueous MEA-based CO2
capture process was built in Aspen Plus software, and the effect of various important operation parameters on
reboiler duty was investigated using sensitivity analysis. Considering both cooling energy consumption and heat
consumption, two different configurations with heat pump were proposed and the improvement performances on
energy demand were compared.

2. Methodology
2.1 Primary process flow
As shown in Figure 1, a conventional post-combustion CO2 capture process was adopted for process simulation.
Flue gases containing CO2 were fed into absorb at the bottom and flow upward. The lean amine solution
regenerated from stripper entered absorb at the top and contacted with the flue gases flowing in the counter-
current direction to chemically react with CO2. The rich amine solution left the column bottom and entered to the
top of the stripper through a lean/rich heat exchanger. And the amine absorbent heated by steam in the reboiler
was regenerated and recycled back to the absorbent. The produced CO2 gas left from stripper at the top after
condensation.

Figure 1: Flow sheets of a conventional amine-based post-combustion capture process.

According to the data of a 650 MW power plant with a 38.9 % net efficiency (EIA, 2013), the flow rate of flue
gases was chosen to be 3,100 t/h. Assuming NOx and SOx were removed completely before they entered the
CO2 capture system, the flue gases fed into the absorber were assumed to be at 40 °C and 1.1 bar (Oh et al.,
2016) containing 12 % CO2, 78 % N2, and 10 % H2O (Wang et al., 2011).
2.2 Thermodynamics
For thermodynamic properties of the CO2-MEA-H2O system, the unsymmetric electrolyte NRTL property method
(ENRTL-RK) was used in the amines property package of Aspen Plus (Li et al., 2016). As shown in Table 1,
reactions 1-5 were used to assume that all the ionic reactions were in equilibrium. For reaction models of
Absorber/Stripper, instantaneous reactions (1, 3 and 5) and finite rate reactions 6-10 were consisted, and the
following power law expression was used for rate-controlled reactions:
N
AND
rk exp( ) ( ÿ ÿ
ÿ
XYii )Zi (1)
RT Yo
ÿ
1

Where r is the rate of reaction; k, E, T are the pre-exponential factor, activation energy (cal/mol) and absolute
temperature (K), respectively; R is the universal gas constant, cal/(mol K); N is the number of components in the
reaction; Xi is the mole fraction of component i; Yi and Zi are the activity coefficient and the stoichiometric
coefficient of component i in the reaction equation, respectively. And parameters were provided in Table 1.
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Table 1: Parameters k and E in the finite rate reactions (Li et al., 2016)
no Tpye Reactions k E (cal/mol)
1 - -
Equilibrium 2H2O ÿ H3O+ + OHÿ
2 CO2 + 2H2O ÿ H3O+ + HCO3 - - -
Equilibrium
3 HCO3 ÿ + H2O ÿ CO3 2ÿ + H3O+ - -
Equilibrium
4 MEAH+ + H2O ÿ MEA + H3O+ - -
Equilibrium
5 MEACOO- +H2O ÿ MEA+HCO3 - - -
Equilibrium
6 Kinetic CO2 +OH- ÿ HCO3 - 1.33e+17 13,249
7 Kinetic HCO3 - ÿ CO2 + OH- 6.63e+16 25,656
8 Kinetic MEA+CO2 + H2O ÿ MEACOO- + H3O+ 3.02e+14 9,855.8
9 Kinetic MEACOO- + H3O+ÿMEA + CO2+H2O (Absorb) 5.52e+23 16,518
10 Kinetic MEACOO- + H3O+ÿMEA + CO2+H2O (Stripper) 6.50e+27 22,782

3. Results and discussion

3.1 Based case CO2 capture process

A general regenerative Absorber/Stripper flowsheet was adopted as the based case design for MEA-based CO2
capture process. Due to a large amount of flue gas for a 650MW power plant, four parallel process trains were adopted, and the flue
gas of 775 t /h was treated by each process train containing an absorb column with packing of Ø12 m × H8 m and a stripper column
with packing of Ø7.5 m × H8 m. The primary operation parameters for the based case were shown in Table 2.

Table 2: Primary operation parameters of the based case

CO2 removal ratio Pabs pstrip

85% 1.06 bar 2 bar

Temperature of CO2 load of
MEA concentration
lean liquid, Tlean lean liquid, ÿlean
30 wt.% 40°C 0.25

For the based case, the temperature fields and gas phase compositions in the columns were discussed. As shown in Figure 2, the
temperatures of both liquid and gas phase increased and then decreased in their flow direction, and the maximum temperatures
occurred at the 4th stage. When lean solution with more MEA entered into the absorb at the 1st stage, the streams were heated
rapidly by large absorption heat released owing to chemical reaction. Then liquid was cooled by the upward gas phase, resulting in a
large temperature difference at the bottom of absorb. However, a smaller temperature difference between liquid and gas was found in
the stripper.

80

75 Liquid 120
Gas Liquid
70 Gas
115
65
)CeoT(
erutarepm

60
)CeoT(
erutarepm

110

55

fifty 105

Four. Five
(to) (b)
100
0 5 10 fifteen twenty 0 5 10 fifteen twenty

Stage number Stage number

Figure 2: Temperature field of absorber (a) and stripper (b).

Then, the mass flow rates of liquid and gas phases were discussed. Figure 3a showed that a rapid change occurred for both liquid
and gas at the stage 1-4, while the flow rates of H2O and CO2 in gas phase had marked change according to Figure 3b. In the upper
part, a high CO2 absorption rate due to more free MEA and higher temperature resulted in a rapid reduction of upward carbon dioxide,
and the higher temperature promoted water
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evaporation into gas phase. However, both a lower CO2 absorption rate and little water evaporation owing to
lower temperature and saturated absorbent let to a gentle change of mass flow rates. A similar trend of flow rate
of H2O in gas phase was found with the temperature field, so water vaporization could be decreased by
controlling a lower temperature of lean solution entering into absorb.

2650 200 MEA

Liquid H2O
Gas
2600 CO2
150
2550

850 100

) s1s-whao·M
tl(f
sswao)/M
thl(f

800
fifty
750

700 0 (b)
(to)

0 5 10 fifteen twenty 0 5 10 fifteen twenty

stage number Stage number

Figure 3: (a) The flow rates changes of liquid and gas phase in absorb; (b) the flow rates changes of gas
components in absorb.

3.2 Parameter sensitivity study

Appropriate operation parameters in a CO2 capture system can maintain stable operation and reduce the
regeneration energy consumption. Figure 4a showed the influence of lean CO2 loading on the regeneration duty
and solution flow rate. With the increase of CO2 loading in lean solution from 0.1 to 0.35, the flow rate of lean
liquid increased from 1, 465 t/h to 4, 870 t/h and a rapid increase appeared at a larger lean CO2 loading .
However, the CO2 regeneration duty presented a rapid reduction firstly and then an increase. And there was a
lower value of 3.87 GJ/t CO2 at the lean CO2 loading of 0.2 mol CO2/mol amine. At a larger value of CO2
loading, the increase of solvent circulation flow rate resulted in an increase in the sensible heat. When the read CO2
loading was below 0.2, a faster absorption was provided due to more MEA, but a larger amount of heat demand
was required to regenerate solution at a low CO2 loading.

4.8
5.4 130
5000 4.6 Reboiler duty
5.2 Reboiler energy 128
Solution flow rate reboiler temperature
4.4
to)/aS
elo th
l(rf

5.0
noituw

126
4000
GoC
R
d(t

4.2
teu
rel)io2y/bJO
n

4.8
124
4.6 4.0
eR(t
Ceo
erutraerleiop)bm
GC
teu
rel)io2y/bJO Rd(t

3000 122
4.4 3.8 120
4.2
2000
3.6 118
4.0
3.4 116
3.8 (to) (b)
1000 3.2 114
0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 1.6 1.8 2.0 2.2 2.4 2.6
Lean CO2 loading (mol CO2 /mol amine) Stripper pressure (bar)

Figure 4: Effects of (a) lean CO2 loading (b) stripper pressure on CO2 regeneration energy.

Stripper pressure affects the partial pressure of components and the profile of temperature in stripper. Therefore,
it is more meaningful for energy saving to elevate the stripper pressure. As shown in Figure 4b, obviously, a 0.45
GJ/t CO2 reduction in the heat demand for MEA regeneration was presented when the stripper pressure
increased from 1.6 bar to 2.6 bar. On the one hand, the water vaporization was restrained due to the increase of
partial vapor pressure, and heat of water vaporization decreased. On the other hand, the higher stripper
temperature promoted the CO2 desorption process, and more sensitive heat was recovered in lean/rich heat
exchanger due to the higher temperature of lean solution from the bottom of stripper. However, the increase in
stripper pressure also lets you elevate reboiler temperature, which would intensify the degradation of amine and
corrosion, and increase the maintenance cost and the accident risk. Meanwhile, the high pressure would
increase equipment investment and preparation difficulty during the period of design and preparation. In addition,
higher quality steam from vapor system was required to reach higher temperature, resulting in a lower
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power plant efficiency. Therefore, in this study, 2.0 bar was chosen as a suitable pressure with reboiler temperature 121.9 °C and
regeneration duty 3.87 GJ/t CO2.

3.3 Process Optimization

In the conventional process, CO2 and vapor at a higher temperature from the top of stripper are cooled directly by a condenser and
the condensed water is as the reflux back to stripper. Hence, more sensitive heat and latent heat are not recovered and utilized
effectively. Furthermore, more cooling water is required. Based on the optimized operational parameters, two capture processes with
heat pump technology were proposed and illustrated to further reduce the energy consumption.

For Configuration-1 shown in Figure 5a, the top stream of stripper (103.4 °C, 2 bar) was compressed by a compressor (isentropic
efficiency: 0.85, mechanical efficiency: 0.85) to improve its energy quality. Then, the compressed stream (334.3 °C, 15 bar) exchanged
heat with the lean solution from the bottom in HX-2 to a gas-liquid mixed stream (131.8 °C). Hence, the latent heat and partial
sensitive heat were recovered to provide
regeneration energy in HX-2. Through an expander, the stream at a low pressure (2 bar) and temperature (82.2 °C) entered into a
flash to separate CO2 after cooled to 40 °C. Due to the heat supply from heat pump system, reboiler duty was decreased observably
from 3.87GJ/t CO2 to 2.77 GJ/t CO2.

(to) (b)

Figure 5: The proposed CO2 capture processes assisted heat pump: (a) Configuration-1; (b) Configuration-2 .

In Configuration-2, the compressed stream leaving from HX-2 was fed directly into HX-3 to heated part of rich solution (mass split
ratio: 0.5: 9.5), and then was expended. After cooled to 40 °C by Cooler-2, gas and liquid phase were separated, and the liquid was
mixed into lean solution from the lean/rich heat exchanger (HX-1).
The stream leaving stripper was heated to a higher temperature by the partial rich solution (119.3 °C) from HX-3, and a higher quality
stream was obtained to assist the regeneration process. Therefore, the reboiler duty is further reduced to 2.38 GJ/t CO2.

Table 3: Performance comparison of different processes (GJ/ t CO2)

Based case Parameter optimization Configuration-1 Configuration-2

Cooler-1 1.66 1.27 1.27 1.30
Cooler-2 1.21 1.15 0.49 0.11
Cooling energy
2.87 2.42 1.76 1.41
consumption
Reboiler 4.05 3.87 2.77 2.38
Compressor -- -- 0.50 0.58
Regeneration energy
4.05 3.87 3.27 2.96
consumption

In a capture system, the energy consumption could be divided into two categories: regeneration energy consumption and cooling
energy consumption. In Table 3, two kinds of energy consumption for based case, the process after parameters optimization, and
two configurations with heat pump system were calculated and compared. Compared with based case, as a result of effective
recovery of sensitive and latent heat in
Configuration-2, regeneration energy consumption and cooling energy consumption were reduced by 26.9 % and 50.9 %, respectively.
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4. Conclusions
A typical CO2 capture process using MEA as a solvent in a coal-fired power plant was simulated and designed
to be less energy consumption. All simulations were performed using Aspen Plus software. The thermodynamic
model of ENRTL-RK was adopted and the equilibrium stage model was used to analyze the characteristics of
columns. The changes of temperatures and flow rates of all components indicated that temperature field had a
large impact on absorption/desorption performance, so structuring an appropriate temperature field could help
to reduce energy consumption.
The effects of two operation parameters on regeneration duty were discussed. Compared with based case, the
regeneration duty decreased to 3.87 GJ/t CO2 from 4.05 GJ/t CO2. Application of Heat pump system effectively
recovered latent heat and partial sensitive heat, and the proposed configuration reduced the system's regeneration
energy requirement and cooling energy consumption by 26.9 % and 50.9 %.

Acknowledgments

This work is supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 51576022), National Natural Science
Foundation of China (No. 51276205).

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