Orbital Achieves 53.7% Improvement in CO₂ Concentration Prediction Accuracy
Carbon capture
Imperial College ABB pilot plant
20 Apr 2025
Improvement in CO₂ concentration prediction
Accuracy in early failure detection
The Imperial College ABB Carbon Capture Pilot Plant is a research-scale facility designed to demonstrate post-combustion CO₂ capture using monoethanolamine (MEA) solvent systems. This study aimed to:
Improve upon CO₂ concentration prediction against Imperial’s state-of-the-art model
Benchmark Orbital’s performance against current state-of-the-art simulation-based optimisation and anomaly detection methods (e.g., TimesNet, DAE-LSTM).
The pilot plant simulates a full post-combustion carbon capture loop. Flue gas enters the absorber column (E101), where CO₂ is absorbed by lean MEA. The rich MEA is then pre-heated and sent to the stripper column (E100), where CO₂ is desorbed and sent to storage. The regenerated MEA is recycled back to the absorber.