化学工程联合国家重点实验室（清华大学）学术论坛第三十一期信息，欢迎各位老师参加！
报告题目：Global Warming and Chemical Engineering:The Use of Solvent Impregnated Polymers for Carbon Capture
主讲人：Prof. Geoff Stevens Department of Chemical Engineering，The University of Melbourne
报告时间：2019年5月14日 14:00-15:00
报告地点：工物馆324A
报告摘要
Global climate change has become of worldwide concern and recently drawing continuous attention. This is often attributed to anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) from energy-intensive manufacturing processes including cement, iron, steel, natural gas production, and power generation. Even though renewable energy such as solar, geothermal, wind and tidal has been developing rapidly, the energy shortage forces traditional fossil fuels to be continued beyond 2030 in these industrial processes, which contributes up to 60% of global fossil fuel emissions. The high carbon content of fossil fuels is ultimately transferred into CO2 and released to the atmosphere. In order to limit the increase in temperature due to global warming below a threshold of 2°C by 2100, carbon capture utilisation and storage (CCUS) has become one of the most feasible mitigation technologies.
Compared to other mitigation strategies such as renovation of the current manufacturing processes to improve energy efficiency and application of renewable energies, CCUS can be implemented with less risk and uncertainty. However, CCUS, and in particular carbon capture, is still expensive and in order to be more acceptable, more efficient and cheaper, capture technologies need to be developed. In this presentation we explore two of these. The first is to examine the potential of reducing the energy used in heating and cooling of water in the traditional solvent process by examining phase change solvents. This involves a better understanding of the thermodynamics and crystalisation behaviour of these solvents. The second is to explore the use of encapsulated solvents. This enables the consideration of a range of solvents that were previously thought inappropriate due to poor physical properties.
Both of these approaches illustrate potential to reduce the cost of large scale carbon capture and so hasten its application and so reduce the influence of CO2 on global warming.
个人简介
Professor Stevens is internationally recognised for his work on separations processes, he was the Director of the Peter Cook Centre for Carbon Capture and Storage Research, and the Director of the Particulate Fluids Processing Centre (PFPC) a Special Research Centre of the ARC for 10 years and is a Project Leader in the CRC for greenhouse gas remediation (CO2CRC). He is the Australian Representative on the International Solvent Extraction Committee and is an Editorial of 'Solvent Extraction and Ion Exchange' and 'Chinese Journal of Chemical Engineering’.
His research interests are in the areas of separation processes, particularly solvent extraction, interfacial phenomena and emulsion stability. The research is primarily in the hydrometallurgical field but also covers aspects of food, pharmaceutical processing and environmental or waste water processing.
Professor Stevens has been named in Engineers Australia’s list of the 100 Most Influential Engineers for 2007, 2009 and 2010. Sponsored by Engineers Australia, the list aims to acknowledge engineers who have a positive influence on society.
