Abstract:
The need to develop and employ clean energy technologies is imperative to tackle global warming and, at the same time, meet the growing energy demand of society. Examples of clean energy technologies include biomass valorization, enhanced energy efficiency of the existing processes, electrification, and carbon capture. Traditionally, a new process is developed using empirical correlations and experimentation at different scales. This approach is expensive and time consuming and cannot probe a large design space. Recent progress in High Performance Computing (HPC) and ML/AI tools provides a unique opportunity to rapidly develop emerging chemical processes. This talk will focus on the use of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and machine learning in modeling complex reactors used in biomass conversion into fuels.