Low Temperature Performance of Selective Catalytic Reduction of NO with NH3 under a Concentrated CO2 Atmosphere

Abstract

Selective catalytic reduction of NOx with NH3 (NH3-SCR) has been widely investigated to reduce NOx emissions from combustion processes, which cause environmental challenges. However, most of the current work on NOx reduction has focused on using feed gas without CO2 or containing small amounts of CO2. In the future, oxy-fuel combustion will play an important role for power generation, and this process generates high concentrations of CO2 in flue gas. Therefore, studies on the SCR process under concentrated CO2 atmosphere conditions are important for future SCR deployment in oxy-fuel combustion processes. In this work, Mn- and Ce-based catalysts using activated carbon as support were used to investigate the effect of CO2 on NO conversion. A N2 atmosphere was used for comparison. Different process conditions such as temperature, SO2 concentration, H2O content in the feed gas and space velocity were studied. Under Mn-Ce/AC conditions, the results suggested that Mn metal could reduce the inhibition effect of CO2 on the NO conversion, while Ce metal increased the inhibition effect of CO2. High space velocity also resulted in a reduction of CO2 inhibition on the NO conversion, although the overall performance of SCR was greatly reduced at high space velocity. Future investigations to design novel Mn-based catalysts are suggested to enhance the SCR performance under concentrated CO2 atmosphere conditions.

Keywords

• selective catalytic reduction (SCR)
• oxy-fuel combustion
• low-temperature
• Mn
• Ce
• CO2