Model Predictive Control of Post-Combustion CO2 Capture Process integrated with a power plant

Abstract The process of CO 2 capture and storage is a promising and effective way to control the emissions of CO 2 from large-scale power plants. One of the most used promising near-term options for large-scale deployment of CO 2 capture and storage (CCS) technologies is the post-combustion CO 2 capture. However, it is vital that the decarbonisation of power plants does not limit the ability of the plant to operate in a flexible, load following manner. Therefore, the integration of CO 2 capture process and power plants will increase the need to design advanced model-based control systems to account for the process interactions and maintain dynamic operability of power plant and CCS unit. In this work an advanced Model Predictive Control (MPC) scheme has been designed to evaluate the controllability of a post-combustion plant in the presence of disturbances associated with the dynamic operation of the power plant. The results have shown that the implementation of the MPC formulation proves to be a very good option to address such complex problems in CO 2 capture.