Fan's Chemical Looping technology licensed by Ohio-based Babcock & Wilcox

“This is my life’s work,” Liang-Shih Fan, PhD, has said about the groundbreaking clean energy technology he’s spent the past 30 years developing.

Fan’s work reached an important milestone recently when Akron-based Babcock & Wilcox licensed a chemical looping process and oxygen carrier particle used for decarbonization and the production of hydrogen, steam and/or syngas. The technology chemically harnesses the energy in feedstocks such as natural gas, biogas from biomass, or coal among other carbonaceous feedstocks and efficiently isolates the carbon dioxide produced before it can be released into the atmosphere. Fan is a Distinguished University Professor and the C. John Easton Professor in Engineering in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering.

In a chemical-looping system, a metal oxide, such as iron oxide, provides the oxygen for combustion. The metal oxide reacts with the fuel in the reducer, donating its oxygen to produce a highly concentrated stream of carbon dioxide. The reduced metal cycles to an oxidation chamber, the combustor, where the metal oxide is regenerated by contact with air. The metal oxide is then reintroduced into the reducer, thus completing the loop.

“In the simplest sense, combustion is a chemical reaction that consumes oxygen and produces heat,” Fan said. “Unfortunately, it also produces carbon dioxide, which is difficult to capture and bad for the environment. So, we use a method for releasing the heat without combustion. We carefully control the chemical reaction so that the feedstock never burns—it is consumed chemically, and the carbon dioxide is entirely contained inside the reactor.”