Industry-scale production of a perovskite oxide as oxygen carrier material in chemical looping

How to upscale the production of oxygen carrier particles from laboratory level to industrial level is still challenging in the field of chemical looping. The upscaled oxygen carrier must maintain its physical and chemical properties. In the present contribution, a spray drying granulation protocol was developed to produce a perovskite oxygen carrier (CaMn0.5Ti0.375Fe0.125O3-delta) at an industrial scale. The micro-fluidized bed thermogravimetric (MFB-TGA) experiments were performed to measure the oxygen uncoupling and redox reaction kinetics under the fluidization state with enhanced heat and mass transfer, and the obtained experimental data at different temperatures were fitted by a fluidized-bed reactor coupled with a semi-empirical kinetic model. The physical and chemical properties of granulates were compared with those of the same perovskite composition prepared at the laboratory level. The results show the volume fraction of particle size at 75-500 mu m is greater than 90% for the upscaled granulats, and the particles show no degradation in reactivity and no agglomeration for more than 20 redox cycles at high temperatures. The heterogeneous reaction rates are high, especially for the oxidation, e.g. it only spent similar to 5 s to achieve full oxidation. Low attrition index of 3.74 wt% was found after the five-hour attrition test. The industrial-scale particles possess similar chemical and physical properties as the laboratory-scale particles with regards to the reaction kinetics, attrition index, crystalline phase, etc. The required bed inventories and fan energy consumption were finally estimated and found to be lower than other oxygen carriers reported in the literature.

Automated summary

A spray drying granulation protocol was developed to produce an industrial-scale perovskite oxygen carrier. Micro-fluidized bed thermogravimetric experiments were performed to measure the reaction kinetics, and the obtained data was fitted by a semi-empirical kinetic model. The upscaled granulates showed similar physical and chemical properties to the laboratory-scale particles, with high reaction rates, low attrition rates, and low energy consumption.