INTEGRAL – Research & Development
Research & Development
Securing added value for today with technologies for tomorrow.
Innovations are a central driver for increased competitiveness and the heartbeat of technological progress. INTEGRAL Engineering und Umwelttechnik GmbH is the technology company within the INTEGRAL Group. With our proprietary processes in the field of flue gas purification, we offer our customers technically creative solutions that are individually developed and implemented according to customer needs.
patented CFGC technology
INTEGRAL has been collaborating with research institutions for many years, including the Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien). In 2018, the longstanding partnership with TU Wien was intensified, and the Institute of Process Engineering was commissioned to conduct process simulations to support the detailed design of an flue gas purification plant. As part of this research and development work, a proprietary patent was filed. The patented “Carbon Flue Gas Cleaning Process” (CFGC) was successfully implemented in a steel plant in China, thus directly realizing the invention on an industrial scale. The CFGC process allows exhaust gas streams of 1.8 million standard cubic meters and beyond, as well as sulfur dioxide (SO2) and nitrogen oxide (NOx) loads, to be removed in a single unit at low temperatures (approximately 140°C) using activated carbon.
With the increasingly stringent emission limits, efforts were made to further reduce the nitrogen oxide emissions released into the atmosphere after the flue gas purification systems. A patent was also filed for this purpose. As part of another research project, a test apparatus developed by INTEGRAL was used for experiments at the Vienna University of Technology to explore the possibilities of preloading activated carbon with ammonia. This innovative patent has already been successfully implemented in practice in another flue gas purification plant in China.
INTEGRAL expertise
With the aim of capturing CO2 from the clean flue gas at the end of an flue gas purification chain, further research projects were initiated in 2021 in collaboration with the Vienna University of Technology. The first step was to find a suitable adsorbent for capturing CO2 on a solid carrier material. For this purpose, a synthesis process was developed to produce a corresponding adsorbent. As part of an intensive literature study, potential materials that could serve as adsorbents for CO2 were initially examined. Following a preselection, an adsorbent was synthesized and subsequently tested in various trial series for its CO2 capture performance from an flue gas stream. Very promising results were achieved, which now serve as the basis for further R&D activities towards a large-scale application for the selective capture of CO2 from industrial flue gas.
Decarbonisation
Driven by the idea of a sustainable future, intensive efforts are being made to find solutions for current social, political, and economic issues. A particular focus lies in expanding the technology portfolio for the area of CO2 capture. In cooperation with the Institute of Chemical, Environmental and Bioscience Engineering at the Vienna University of Technology, research is being conducted on the project “CO2 Capture in Fixed Bed”. The goal of this project is the development and testing of solid adsorbents for fixed bed operation for the selective capture of CO2 from flue gases. The development of such CO2 capture represents an ideal complement to INTEGRAL’s CFGC technology, which is successfully used to remove flue gas components such as sulfur oxides and nitrogen oxides from industrial emissions through the use of activated carbon.