The global warming challenge is one of the greatest innovation opportunities going forward. One strategy is to re-invent combustion from scratch to promote more efficient CO2 capture. A very promising such solution is Chemical Looping Combustion (CLC).

The Cheers project is developing Chemical Looping Combustion (CLC) to the next level. CLC is an energy production technology leveraging inherent, built-in, CO2 capture. This reduces the need for investment in dedicated CO2 separation from low-concentration flue gases. It also reduces operational costs because it uses less energy in its inherent CO2 separation process.

Designing a full-scale CLC plant is still a work in progress. The current fleet of CLC test rigs are made and used for basic research and development. These are now ready to be scaled up to dimensions suitable for commercial application.

The CHEERS project has produced the design basis of a 3 MWth demonstration CLC facility with systems that will allow researchers to understand how to make it even better in the next version. This design basis is now being converted to a Front End Engineering and Design (FEED) by a world-renowned engineering contractor. This will be announced in a post coming soon.

The animation below shows how the system works, and what makes CLC a great candidate for re-inventing combustion.

CHEERS acknowledges generous support from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 764697 and the China MOST program.

CHEERS releases new video from the demonstration laboratory showing the inner workings and flows throughout the CLC installation

The CHEERS project maintains a Youtube channel for its own videos and associated videos that support its basic motivation and objectives. Due to technical reasons, we have moved to a new Youtube channel, which you can find here (subscribe to keep updated). The highest resolution versions of the CHEERS videos will be available there. Lower resolution versions of the same videos will be viewable on the CHEERS web page.

In addition, we are pleased to include a new video produced by our Chinese partner Tsinghua University. In this video, we have a direct view from their research laboratory. The video shows the scaled, cold flow model the CHEERS project has designed and constructed. This cold flow model is built with see-through components that allow direct visualization of the movement of the solid particles in the two reactor towers, the separation units and transfer pipes. The solid particles in the cold model represent the oxygen carrier particles that are circulated in an actual CLC installation. The function of the oxygen carrier particles is to achieve a nitrogen-free atmosphere for combustion, without the need for a separate oxygen production system. This saves significant investment and operation costs, particularly related to CO2 separation.

The cold flow model is essential for validating numerical models that represent the full-scale demonstration plant currently being designed. The results from the cold flow model allow identifying ways to improve the overall performance of the system.