Simulation of the Sour-Compression Unit (SCU) process for CO2 purification applied to flue gases coming from oxy-combustion cement industries

The purpose of the present work was to investigate, for a gas issued from a full oxy-fuel combustion in the cement industry, a CO2 de-SOx and de-NOx process, called Sour-Compression Unit(SCU), thanks to simulations with Aspen Plus TM. An important stage necessary for the SCU modeling has been the construction of an accurate chemical mechanism. Two-column and single-column configurations have been evaluated and compared. A parametric study and a Design Of Experiments have been conducted on a single-column process to study the influence of the operating parameters on the SOx and NOx abatement ratios. As a demonstration of the effectiveness of the model, three SOx and NOx purity specifications (depending on the further applications of the CO2) were applied to the purified gas. The feature of the investigated model lies on optimizing the way to reach the purity target in order to decrease installation costs (CAPEX) and energy requirements (OPEX). (C) 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.