Doctoral Themes

Hydrogen as co-fuel for a carbon neutral cement industry: a reaction engineering study towards industrial implementation

Supervisors

Carla Isabel Costa Pinheiro, carla.pinheiro@tecnico.ulisboa.pt

Pedro Freitas Mendes, pedro.f.mendes@tecnico.ulisboa.pt

Registration Institution

Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa

Project description

Hydrogen has been considered as a sustainable alternative to carbon-based fuel in the last few years, but the industrial implementation of its combustion, particularly in the cement industry, is far from widespread. While its feasibility has been demonstrated for simple burners, the combustion in the presence of limestone is substantially more complex. While the reactor hydrodynamics has been widely studied for various industrial technologies, the reaction chemistry is yet to be investigated, particularly the impact of H₂ combustion on CaCO₃ calcination.

The main goal of this project is to study the feasibility of using H₂ as a combustion co-fuel for solid refuse derived fuels (RDF) combustion, as a source of clean energy for cement production, and its interplay with the limestone (CaCO₃) calcination reaction, to ultimately optimize the combustion process under industrially-relevant reactor configurations and operating conditions.

The proposed work comprises four main tasks:

1. Determination of the effect of adsorption of a small amount of H₂ on the combustion of alternative solid RDF fuels by TGA with DSC.

2. Investigating H₂ combustion at industrial-scale, via the acquisition of plant data in presence of solid fuel, CO₂ and O₂.

3. Understanding the key phenomena at industrial-scale, via the multi-scale modeling of the reactions, including CaCO₃ calcination, and the reactor.

4. Optimize the reactor configuration and reaction conditions via the model established in task 3.

Task 2 will last 9 months and take place in the cement producer SECIL as host institution with the collaboration of Dr. Margarida Mateus.

Keywords

CO₂ emissions reduction; Hydrogen combustion; Wastes combustion; CaCO₃ calcination; Carbon

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