Kinetics Analysis of Cu-Zr Oxygen Carrier for Chemical Looping Oxygen Production

Chemical looping oxygen production (CLOP) is a new air separation technology for producing oxygen. The features of CLOP are operation-simple, cost-effective and energy-extensive. The continuous or discontinuous oxygen production process is achieved by cycling of oxygen carriers between the reduction and oxidation reactors. In this study, the CuO/ZrO2 oxygen carrier was prepared by mechanical mixing. BET, SEM and XRD were used to analyze the specific surface area, surface morphology and phases of oxygen carrier. The phases of oxygen carrier are only CuO and ZrO2. There is no agglomeration in the surface of oxygen carrier. The BET values increase with the increase of weight ratio of binder. The mechanism experiments were carried out in STA409PC thermal analyzer and the temperature programmed thermogravimetry was used to investigate the effects of gas flow, sample mass, heating rate and weight ratio of binder on reduction and oxidation reactions. The results show that the CuO/ZrO2 oxygen carrier has high reactivity of releasing and adsorbing oxygen. When the gases flows are higher than 30 mL/min and sample mass is less than 10 mg, the reaction rates are not controlled by the internal and external diffusion