Design of a Carbon Free 3D Ion Transport Membrane Reactor for Gas Turbine Combustors

Carbon dioxide is the most important greenhouse gas and it is the main contributor to the global warming. This necessitates recovering and capturing of carbon dioxide in order to reduce its concentration in the atmosphere. In order to capture and store CO2 from gas turbine combustion products in gas-turbine power plants, the process based on oxy-fuel combustion appears to be the most promising carbon capture process. The concept of operation of this technology is the combustion in an environment using high purity commercial oxygen in order to achieve high carbon dioxide concentrations in the exhaust gases for carbon dioxide separation through a simple condensation process of water vapor. During the last decade, successive research works were focused on developing and improving ion transport membranes (ITMs) for separation of oxygen from high temperature air streams. This proposed work is aiming at the development of a 3-D ion transport membrane (ITM) reactor for use in gas turbine combustors. In this work, an oxy-fuel gas turbine combustor together with the ITM required for oxygen separation will be designed for developing the required power of a typical gas turbine. The research will start with designing the ion transport membrane reactor considering different configurations of the reactor units in order to reach the optimum design. This requires conducting a parametric study for the optimization of flow rates through the reactor, the channel cross-section and size, the number of channels and the percentage of fuel in the permeate sides of the membranes. The parametric study also includes the flow configuration in the gases in the two membrane sides (co-current or counter-current) in order to maximize the oxygen permeation flux. The new design should be capable of replacing the conventional gas turbine combustor typically used in gas power plants and develop the same power.