Kinetic parameters of petroleum coke gasification for modelling chemical-looping combustion systems

One of the best low-cost approaches for capturing carbon dioxide from the combustion of solid fuels is chemical looping combustion (CLC) technology, where the processes of fuel oxidation and extraction of oxygen from the air are split in two separate reactors. In order to model the petroleum coke (petcoke) conversion in a CLC method, detailed knowledge about the reactions of pet-coke with O₂, CO₂, and H₂O at temperatures between 750 and 1100 °C is required. Due to the lack of sufficient literature data, in this paper, the reactivity of these reactions is investigated in a custom-built test rig that enabled measurements of the mass loss of the fuel sample and the composition of the released gases. The Avrami, Random Pore, Shrinking Core, and Hybrid models were applied to the experimental results to determine the kinetic parameters of petcoke gasification. At temperatures up to 1000 °C, the reaction with CO₂ was found to be negligibly slow. An activation energy of 103.91 kJ/mol was obtained for petcoke gasification in 10–40 vol% of H₂O, while a value of 15.87 kJ/mol was found for oxidation in 2–4 vol% O₂, as described by best-fitting models, i.e. Hybrid and Random Pore models, respectively.