OPTIMIZATION OF A SIMULTANEOUS COMPRESSION/DISSOLUTION PROCESS OF CARBON DIOXIDE IN WATER

The effects of temperature rising due to the increasing amount of greenhouse gases are already easily visible. The most immediate consequences is the increase of unusual atmospheric events like tropical hurricanes and precipitations which lead to undesirable results as see levels rising and coral reef, desertification and moving of earth climatic area. The target announced by the Conference of Paris in 2015 sets a goal to limit the increase of temperature up to 1.5°C in respect to the pre-industrial age. The achievement of this goal can be considered the biggest challenge of this century and requires a huge effort from all the international community in order to face a strong decarbonisation process in most of the society sections. Already, big effort has been carried out in this direction, but much more investments are needed in the next decades in order to increase the amount of energy produced by renewable fuels. The increase of fluctuating renewable energy generation will lead to stability problems in the electric grid. This results to pay bigger attention on solutions on how to store the renewable energy surplus. The power to chemicals technologies appears as a promising solution for a long-term electricity storage. It is able to deal with different applications in terms of release time and amount of stored energy. The simultaneous compression/dissolution process of CO2 and water investigated in this work is part of the European project CELBICON, which aims to create added value chemicals with high global efficiency. This technology promise a theoretical energy saving of about 40 % compared to the traditional separate gas and water compression with subsequent dissolution. This energy saving is given by the combination of high isothermal behaviour of the process because of the big heat capacity of the sprayed water and by the reduced gaseous mole to compress because of dissolution occurrence. Experiments are performed varying nozzles and the compression speed in order to understand how the process evolves for different spray pattern and different dissolution time. The obtained results show near values to the theoretical target, this allows to take into account this technology for further applications.