Development and Testing of Polybenzimidazole (PBI) Hollow-Fiber Membrane Technology for Pre-Combustion CO2 Capture (FE0031633) Palitha Jayaweera, Elisabeth Perea, Srinivas Bhamidi, Xiao Wang, Regina Elmore, Indira Jayaweera*
Summary: SRI has developed Polybenzimidazole (PBI) hollow-fiber membranes (HFMs) that can be chemically and physically optimized for various commercial gas separation applications. PBI is a commercially available polymer with excellent thermal/chemical stability and, PBI HFMs and the membrane modules assembled at SRI have been successfully demonstrated for CO2 capture from syngas streams containing CO2, H2, CO, steam, and other trace-level gases. In the precombustion application, the membrane system will be situated downstream of the water gas shift reactors of the IGCC plant. The syngas stream will be operated above its dew point, and the membrane module will be used to separate H2 and steam from the rest of the syngas stream. The permeate content, H2, steam, and a few percent of acid gases along with the sweep gas N2 will be sent to the turbine unit. The retentate that include CO2 will be compressed to pipeline pressure for delivery/transportation after removal of trace gases in a high-pressure processing unit. In this new project, we plan to perform parametric and steady-state testing of PBI-HFM gas separation skid to obtain system performance data covering full range of operating pressures and temperatures with actual coal-derived syngas stream from an oxygen-blown gasifier. Furthermore, we will perform component and system modeling and simulation, and techno-economic analysis of the commercial concept of PBI-HFM capture system integrated into a 550-MW (net) power plant. Project Team: SRI International, University of Kentucky, PBI Performance Products, Enerfex Inc, Energy Commercialization. Contact: Indira S. Jayaweera, Senior Staff Scientist/Program Manager, indira.jayaweera@sri.com, +1-650-859-4042
