Design of a carbon capture system for oxy-fuel combustion in compression ignition engines with exhaust water recirculation

The oxy-fuel combustion engine concept with onboard oxygen generation and carbon capture (CC) is studied using as a starting point a baseline oxy-fuel combustion layout coupled to a mixed ionic-electronic conducting membranes for producing oxygen (O2) from the air. A CC system is designed accounting for the flash-out temperatures and the operating pressure of the last CO2 purification step. The proposed engine concept is optimized through the product of useful effective efficiency and engine brake power,which is maximized actuating on the start of injection (SOI) for every assessed gas path layouts. The additional cooling power required by the carbon capture system (CC) is also contemplated . Initially, two approaches are compared when the CC is coupled to the O2 generation unit, including or not an intake cooler. The use of intake cooler yields better engine performance than removing it but increases the cooling power requirements significantly. The extreme results from using or not the intake cooler, indicates that a proper solution could combine both cases, approaching for a different cooling concept. A mixer model is developed to recirculate part of the water condensed in the CC towards the cylinder inlet to lower the intake gas temperature and increase the oxidizer heat capacity ratio. From this layout, an optimum setup for SOI and recirculated water mass flow is found considering the trade-off between additional cooling power and engine performance. Indeed, this case reduces the total ICE additional cooling power required by the exclusive use of an intake cooler by about 27% and improves the engine performance by about 20% in comparison to the lack of intake cooling of the charge flow.