Multiphase processing for new materials

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Anthropogenic emissions of CO2 have increased every year since the 1830’s. With 25 Gt in 2007, it could reach an estimated 35 Gt within 15 years. This production represents an excess of one fourth the Earth’s natural capacity to maintain its CO2 concentration constant and explains the increase in its atmospheric concentration from 270 to 400 ppm (2013) over the last 175 years. During the last decade, China commissioned a 500MW coal-fired power plant every week or so. Electricity production accounts for one third of fuel burning emissions (International Energy Agency, 2011). This trend should not be modified over the next decades augmenting the need for innovative, efficient, and economical CO2 capture. Ernie Moniz from USA said today that coal is going to be part of the American’s energy mix for many decades. Industrialized countries must look for the development of economical solutions to capture CO2 because the development pressure is so for the developing countries that there will be no reason for them to adopt such processes other than an economical advantage. In the refining and petrochemical industries, CO2 capture has been a fact for many years with well known and understood technologies. However, these technologies were developed with intrinsic limitations. Gas hydrates are a class of solids in which gas molecules occupy cages made up of hydrogen-bonded water molecules. If gas hydrates are seen as calamities in the natural gas processing industry, they have seldom been seen as a product and even less as a flue gas treatment option. A number of small gas molecules can form hydrates at pressures as low as 10 bars and temperature between 0 and 10oC. In the Canadian context, these temperatures are easily achieved with heat pumping and without. The formation and decomposition of gas hydrates are first order phase transitions with an associated enthalpy of transition, and offer an innovative opportunity for gas separation. The proposed research program has multiphase hydrodynamics in its core, the domain of expertise of the applicant with over 40 publications in that field over the last 6 years. The proposed program includes in-depth studies on the generation of CO2 hydrates from industrial gases mixtures with the aim of better explaining the underlying transport phenomena using the published thermodynamic literature ruling their production and destruction as well as making use of the thermodynamics modifiers present in the literature. The research will mainly rely on experimental investigations involving high-end batch and continuous mixing technologies to determine the effects of gas composition, the effect of the process thermodynamics and processing conditions on the generation and destruction of the hydrates. In this program, the applicant’s experience with mixing processes as well as his knowledge on modeling multiphase hydrodynamics constitutes a natural extension of his work.