Research on Thermodynamic Performance of Chemical Looping Combustion System Based on Split Heating at Inlet of Air Reactor

Chemical-looping-combustion technology enables clean and efficient power generation from fossil fuels by virtue of its zero-energy carbon capture and waste heat cascade utilization. In this paper, an air reactor inlet split-heating configuration for the chemical looping combustion power generation system was proposed to avoid layout complexity due to waste heat recovery. Thermodynamic modelling, parameter optimization analysis and performance comparison of the proposed system were carried out using ASPEN and MATLAB. The results show that there exist an optimum split ratio and an optimum reactor operating pressure to optimize the system design performance. The increase in air reactor operating temperature reduces the flow rate of air with cooling effect, but increases the gas turbine expansion work by increasing the fuel reactor operating temperature. The optimal power generation efficiency and the exergy efficiency of the proposed system are 52.93% and 48.97% respectively, which are higher than the thermodynamic performance of the reference system.