We are proud to announce that Hallvard F. Svendsen, Hanna K. Knuutila, Ardi Hartono, Maxime Francois and Diego Morlando at NTNU, together with external collaborators Peter Moser (RWE) and Georg Wiechers (RWE) have published a new article presenting results from the AURORA and SCOPE projects.
The publication introduces a new class-based aerosol model for the CESAR1 solvent system, providing improved insight into droplet growth and aerosol emissions during CO₂ capture. The model is validated against pilot-scale data from the RWE Niederaussem plant under operating conditions covering both low and high particle number count (PNC).
📄 Title: Understanding aerosol growth and emissions: CO2 capture in the RWE Niederaussem pilot plant using CESAR1
📚 Journal: International Journal of Greenhouse Gas Control
🔬 Key findings
- Improved prediction of aerosol behavior: The model successfully predicts steady-state amine concentrations in the water wash, the composition of droplets interacting with the outlet demister, and the resulting emissions.
- Aerosols matter: Aerosols account for a significant fraction of the solvent emission—up to 92% of piperazine (PZ) and 30% of 2-amino-2-methylpropanol (AMP) under high PNC. .
- Particle number count and size effects: At low PNC, droplets grew to similar sizes regardless of initial size, while at high PNC, outlet droplet sizes depended strongly on inlet size. Larger droplets carried higher amine concentrations and higher PZ/AMP ratios than smaller ones.
- Gas phase amine depletion: Even at low PNC, aerosols reduced gas-phase amine concentrations, with PZ being much more affected than AMP.
📌 Conclusion
A new validated class-based aerosol model was developed and validated against pilot plant data at RWE Niederaussem. The model predicts well the amine emissions and provides insights into aerosol droplet size growth and amine concentration development along the absorber and water wash columns.
This approach provides a more reliable tool for designing cleaner, safer, and more efficient industrial CO₂ capture systems.
Authors:
- Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) – Department of Chemical Engineering: Diego Morlando, Ardi Hartono and Hanna K. Knuutila.
Stay tuned as AURORA continues to generate knowledge that will help make carbon capture cleaner, safer, and more cost-effective for industries across Europe.
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