Kevin J. Hughes

Decarbonisation of critical hard-to-abate industrial sectors such as the iron and steel industry is crucial for meeting climate targets, with chemical absorption carbon capture identified as a key transitional technology. However, its application is hindered by a significant knowledge gap: the absence of publicly available and transparent performance benchmarks using conventional capture systems under elevated CO2 conditions that are representative of industrial process emissions. An experimental performance campaign was conducted on the chemical absorption pilot plant at the Energy Innovation Centre (EIC) in Sheffield, UK. The study established a novel performance baseline across a wide operating envelope for flue gas concentrations ranging from 10 to 25 mol.% CO2, achieving 90% capture efficiency using a 35 wt.% monoethanolamine (MEA) solvent. In addition, a methodology was developed to quantify solvent regeneration energy and its constituent components, complementing a system energy balance for each capture condition. The results provided experimentally validated insight into the relationship between operating conditions, capture performance, and energy demand at elevated CO2 concentrations. The dataset established a robust baseline for conventional packed-bed systems and improved understanding of regeneration energy contributions under industrially relevant conditions. These findings are scalable for application to the design, operation and optimisation of chemical absorption systems in heavy industries and provide a reliable benchmark for future work on advanced solvents, process intensification and scale-up to commercial deployment.

In the context of global warming and the increasing demands for the application of sustainable fuels, measurements of a variety of experimental targets under a wide range of conditions are crucial to improving the fundamental understanding of real jet fuels and developing quality kinetic mechanisms for large hydrocarbons. Planar laser-induced fluorescence (PLIF) is an effective approach to investigate concentrations of important species of a given flame while quantifying the fluorescence image remains a great challenge with significant uncertainties. This investigation aims to improve the fundamental understanding of the oxidation of kerosene-based mixtures at two equivalence ratio conditions. Two gas fuels are utilized as the reference for the quantitative studies. For each flame condition, relative OH and NO quantities and temperature profiles were measured by applying the PLIF and coated fine wire type R Pt/Pt-Rh thermocouples, respectively. The converted OH and NO results were subsequently compared with the simulation by using ANSYS Chemkin Pro, and the results indicate that reliable temperature profiles are the key to accurately quantify the species concentration of a given flame.