Carnegie Mellon Electricity Industry Center

Capturing CO2 emissions at point sources like thermal power plants or industrial sites, is widely considered an essential pillar in the fight for anthropogenic emissions’ mitigation. Among the feasible pathways to remove the CO2 molecule from a gas mixture like flue gases, absorption through monoethanolamine (MEA) solvents has been traditionally implemented by the chemical engineering industry. Improving the overall efficiency of the capture device and making it more compact would drastically reduce its cost and would significantly foster the proliferation of big-scale carbon capture demonstrations and projects.

Designing new structured packing necessitates delineating the coupled transport mechanisms of heat and mass transfer inside the multi-phase system and tracking of the interface between the vapor and liquid phases. The only tools that can provide this detailed information are Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) models and codes. In this talk we will demonstrate the challenges of modeling such a complex multi-physics system as a CO2 absorber and we will address the issue of exploration of the effect of key geometrical features on the device’s performance. Simulation results from studies focusing only on hydrodynamics and others modeling mass and heat transfer as well, will be discussed. Our work, beyond state-of-the-art CFD toolset, taps into recent advancements in machine learning and additive manufacturing which can prove transformative for scaling up the new technology.

Dr. Grigorios Panagakos is an assistant research professor at the Chemical Engineering Department, Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). He is a mechanical engineer from the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) where he also acquired a post-graduate diploma in automation systems. He holds a MS on computational fluid dynamics from the University of Maryland, College Park and a PhD from the Technical University of Denmark where he worked on “Modeling and Structural Optimization of Solid Oxide Fuel Cells”. After his PhD, he spent two years at the Center for Research and Technology Hellas (CERTH) modeling energy systems. There followed a research fellow position at the National Energy Technology Laboratory-Department of Energy (NETL-DOE) where he shared time between the Solid Oxide Fuel Cells team, the Carbon Capture Simulation for Industry Impact and the Institute for the Design of Advanced Energy Systems.