Reducing the Power Penalty Related to CO2 Conditioning in Oxy-coal Combustion Plants by Pinch Analysis

Oxy-combustion is a competitive technology to enable the capture of CO2 from coal based power plants. The CO2 conditioning process is an important contributor to the power penalty related to CO2 capture in such power plants. The double-stage flash process is commonly applied in literature. The efficiency penalty is around 3.6% points in this case. This paper presents a study on the CO2 conditioning process in three cases: one-stage flash, double-stage flash and three-stage flash. The composite curves are applied to investigate the integration potential. A detailed exergy analysis has been performed to compare the plant performance in the three cases.