Ronson, Dana2026-06-172026-06-172026-06-172026-06-12https://hdl.handle.net/10012/23636Chemical looping combustion (CLC) is an emerging carbon capture process that can produce a high-purity stream of CO2 without the energy-intensive separation that is associated with traditional carbon capture strategies. In the process, a solid metal oxygen carrier (OC) facilitates the splitting of the conventional combustion reaction into distinct oxidation and reduction subreactions such that the fuel and air atmospheres remain separate. CLC has yet to be implemented at industrial scale; hence, there is interest in further developing this emerging technology. One such area of development is the OC material, as the overall performance of a CLC system is crucially dependent on the performance of the OC. While synthetic OCs have been the dominant materials used for CLC development, they demand valuable materials. Thus, there has been a recent interest in utilizing lower-cost materials such as industrial wastes in CLC. The use of industrial waste OCs in CLC has gained recent attention as these materials demonstrate the potential to be a cost-effective alternative to synthetic OCs. A key limitation in the development of CLC with industrial waste OCs is the lack of modeling efforts on CLC systems with these materials. This work presents a dynamic multiscale packed bed reactor CLC model to investigate the performance of red mud, an industrial waste from the alumina refining industry, as an OC. Kinetics describing the oxidation reaction of red mud with oxygen as well as reduction reactions of red mud with CH4, CO, and H2 fuels were identified and validated using lab-scale experimental data. Sensitivity analyses were performed on kinetic parameters and reactor operating conditions, where the model exhibited reasonable predictions. The model developed in this work serves to advance the development of CLC by enabling simulation and model-based design methods for the packed bed reactor with a red mud OC. A proposed nominal pilot scale design exhibits moderate utilization of the red mud OC and high fuel conversion. By producing approximately 848.1 MJ of energy in a single cycle, this design demonstrates the potential for red mud to be an effective OC in large scale CLC. The red mud pilot-scale design was compared to a similar system from the literature that used a synthetic OC, and it was found that the red mud system produced less heat as a result of its low density leading to a smaller solids inventory. Nevertheless, red mud boasts lower material costs than traditional synthetic OCs. An economic optimization of the pilot scale design for separate reduction and oxidation stages revealed that it is crucial to consider the integration of both stages to determine an optimal design for a complete cycle of the CLC system (i.e., jointly considering how the performance of reduction impacts the economics of oxidation).enMaster Thesis