Advanced clean and coal technologies are being actively pursued to improve the competitiveness and environmental performance of coal-fired power generation. New materials are required which can meet the increasingly demanding operating conditions necessary to realize the high performance that the latest systems can, in principle, achieve.
Ceramics are a class of materials which exhibit a wide range of potentially useful properties.
These include membranes for the large scale production of oxygen from air to replace conventional cryogenic air separation units, and membranes to recover hydrogen from the products of coal gasification. This report presents an introduction to these technologies and their application in coal-fired power generation and gives an overview of the current state of their development. The use of ceramics for hot gas particulate filtration is not described in this report.