The Front-End Engineering Design (FEED) is the crucial step before the construction of the demo unit. It covers the technical requirements for the realization of the project. The pre-FEED and FEED studies were carried out from 2018 to 2021. The studies carried out by both the EU and China faced additional challenges apart from the time difference as the COVID pandemic posed significant difficulties in terms of information exchange and collaboration. The presentation of this journey was done by Vincent Gouraud from TotalEnergies, leader of work package 4 and was carried out by Mahdi Yazdanpanah.

The FEED study was successful in considering both European and Chinese configurations. The configurations differ in terms of interaction of the carbon stripper with the rest of the system. Both these configurations were incorporated within the demo unit and can be interchanged. This is increasingly complex considering that the final construction of the demo unit must take into account the separate configurations and their process limitations. 23 design cases were studied, and the controllable parameters were further evaluated. These parameters presented considerable range, for example, the power of the unit can range from 2 to 4 MW thermal, considering thermal input from 66 to 133% of capacity. Considering the fuels for the reduction in the fuel reactor, solid fuels Lignite and Petcoke were considered.

These levels of complexity were not the only challenge, as the unit was a first of its kind in many aspects; L-valves to control solid circulation do not exist at this scale, neither does the specificity of the oxygen carriers changing density along the red-ox cycles. The CLC demo unit requires complex engineering due to solid circulation among many other factors.

Finally DBC premises overcome the challenge of setting up the construction of the 44-meters demo unit between existing buildings. And furthermore, The construction of the demo unit was done in 11 months, a relatively short duration of time.

Despite such a multitude of challenges, the results from the FEED study were significant. Such a study resulted in 235 documents; these documents describe in detail the technical specifications such as process design through to engineering standards but also crucial safety documents such as the HAZID (Hazard identification) HAZOP (Hazard and Operability) and LOPA (Layers of Protection Analysis) studies. The HAZID study analysed 83 cases, identifying 5 potential causes of major accidents and generated 35 key recommendations.

FEED documents produced valuable resources for design and evaluation of industrial scale of the CLC plant, which is useful for further work beyond CHEERS. This highlights the successful intercultural collaboration between the Chinese European partners.

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