The series will run generally on every second Wednesday from 5.00-6.00 in Lecture Room 2, and includes speakers from the Department as well as external speakers.

Previous seminar presentations can be downloaded at www.lcmp.eng.cam.ac.uk/welcome/seminars

Reducing Energy Consumption in Paper Making using Advanced Process Control and Optimisation
Dr Paul C Austin

Senior Research Fellow – University of Cambridge

Professor of Control Systems Engineering – Victoria University of Wellington

Wednesday 3 February, 5-6 PM (Lecture Theater 2)

Paper making is an energy intensive process: in 2006, UK paper makers used an average of 4,060 kWh of primary energy to produce each of 5.63 million tonnes of paper products, which thus used 22,857.8 GWh of energy. A paper machine is a very multivariable process and yet it is typically controlled using traditional single loop control strategies which have difficulty comprehending and compensating for the effect a number of variables may have on each paper quality variable. Consequently, in normal operation many potentially useful control variables remain unused.

The seminar will address the question of how much energy saving benefit multivariable control technology can provide in paper making. Present indications are that at least a 20% reduction may be possible. The energy reduction delivered by two recently implemented APC systems on full scale commercial paper machines in Australia and Canada will be reported. The objectives of two recently initiated university-based research and development projects, aimed at better understanding the potential for reducing energy use in paper making, will also be reviewed.

Paul was born and grew up in the Hutt Valley of New Zealand. He completed a BE (Chem) degree at the University of Canterbury NZ while holding a Tasman Pulp & Paper Co student bursary and he worked at Tasman (now owned by Norske Skog) after graduating. He completed a PhD at Cambridge University in advanced control systems engineering and then embarked upon an academic career in the UK and in NZ. Through his NZ university positions he undertook a number of modelling, simulation and controller design projects in pulp & paper, in electrical energy supply and demand, and in a variety of other industry sectors. This work led Paul into consulting engineering and for 12 of the next 16 years he was responsible for launching performance improvement initiatives in industries world-wide, using multivariable modelling and advanced process control. He and the engineers he has worked with in various companies are all currently employed by Perceptive Engineering, based a little south of Manchester in the UK. More recently he has reduced his industry involvement to allow time to take up part time positions in the Cambridge University Engineering Dept (where he is a Senior Research Fellow) and in the School of Engineering and Computer Science at Victoria University of Wellington (where he is Professor of Control Systems Engineering).

Energy Transitions: Slow Transformations and Difficult Substitutions
Dr Vaclav Smil

Distinguished Professor – University of Manitova

Wednesday 17 February, 5-6 PM (Lecture Theater 2)

The first half would be about the inertial nature of transitions in general, in the second part I would concentrate on the two big processes that (unappreciated and forgotten) underpin our civilization: primary iron production and Haber-Bosch synthesis of ammonia that makes it possible to feed some 3 billion people.

Vaclav Smil is Distinguished Professor at the University of Manitoba and the author of many books, including Energy in Nature and Society: General Energetics of Complex Systems; Energy at the Crossroads: Global Perspectives and Uncertainties; The Earth’s Biosphere: Evolution, Dynamics, and Change; and Energies: An Illustrated Guide to the Biosphere and Civilization, all of which are published by The MIT Press. He was awarded the 2007 Olivia Schieffelin Nordberg Award for excellence in writing and editing in the population sciences.

His interdisciplinary research encompasses a broad area of environmental, energy, food, population, economic and public policy studies, ranging from quantifications and modeling of global biogeochemical cycles to long-range appraisals of energy and environmental options. He has been also applying these approaches to energy, food and environmental affairs of China.

Chemical Looping Combustion: One Technology for the Clean Utilisation of Coal
Dr John S Dennis

Reader in Chemical Reaction Engineering – University of Cambridge

Wednesday 24 February, 5-6 PM (Lecture Theater 2)

Coal is used for around 39% of global production of electricity. Despite being one of the most polluting fossil fuels, in terms of mass of CO2 emitted per unit of power generated, the use of coal is projected to increase from present day levels by ~ 80% by 2030. It is, therefore, imperative to find ways of using it for power generation whilst avoiding the release of CO2 into the atmosphere. The currently-available technology for CO2 separation is by scrubbing the flue gases with, e.g. monoethylamine (MEA): however, this technique comes with a large energy penalty because of the large heat requirement for regeneration of the solvent, reducing the efficiency of the power plant by up to one-third.

Chemical-looping combustion (CLC) has the inherent property of separating CO2 from flue gases without the energy penalty associated with amine scrubbing. Instead of air, it uses an oxygen-carrier, usually in the form of a metal oxide, to provide oxygen for combustion. This presentation will deal with the application of chemical looping to the combustion of solid fossil fuels and will highlight research being undertaken on this topic. Further work on a modification of chemical looping will be described, involving the oxides of iron in packed bed reactors, to produce hydrogen of high purity from low-grade synthesis gas. This offers substantial benefits in terms of the distributed production of hydrogen, avoiding costly transport of the gas by a dedicated grid.

John Dennis was a Lecturer in the Department of Chemical Engineering from 1984 to 1989 having previously been an undergraduate and PhD student there. During this period he published on the control of sulphur emissions from fluidised bed combustors and on the problems of gas combustion in fluidised beds. He left Cambridge to become an engineering consultant in 1989 specialising in the solution of difficult process or economic problems, with areas of technical interest including heat and mass transfer in reactors, combustion, and fluidised bed reactions. He has had close involvement with collaborative research involving academia and industry. He returned to the University and was a University Lecturer from 1st October, 2002, Senior Lecturer from 1st October, 2004 and Reader in Chemical Reaction Engineering from 1st October, 2008. Recent areas of research include the fluidised bed gasification of biomass, fundamental studies of fluidised bed hydrodynamics using MRI, discrete element modelling of fluidised beds, clean coal technology using chemical looping and other techniques, and, as a separate area, the use of microalgae for biofuels.

The Energy Efficient Cities Initiative

Steven Barrett

University Lecturer – University of Cambridge

Ruchi Choudhary

University Lecturer – University of Cambridge

Ying Jin

University Lecturer – University of Cambridge

Wednesday 10 March, 5-6 PM (Lecture Theater 2)

Cities are the largest energy consumer by far. In the UK, around 2/3 of energy demand stems from running buildings and ground transport, mostly in urban areas. In the wider world, rapid urbanisation and ever rising standard of urban living seem insatiable in their demand for energy. The Energy Efficient Cities Initiative is a new inter-disciplinary research project at Cambridge. It explores the deployment of a wide range of technologies from now to 2050, and assesses their effectiveness in reducing energy use and environmental impacts against the context of global trends, policy and planning. The system-level analysis enables a robust scaling-up of the impact of technological innovations to the city, and accounts for rebound effects and trade-offs over time. In this lecture, a progress report will be given on the construction of a new generation of integrated simulation models and their use in assessing technology and policy options.

Ruchi Choudhary specializes in building simulation with a particular interest in multicriteria modelling of energy demand and environmental characteristics of the built environment. Her research is on simulation-based optimization methodologies for energy management and performance assessment of buildings. Steven Barrett’s main research interests are in quantifying and mitigating the environmental impacts of the transport sector. Steven focuses on system-level assessments of technological and regulatory environmental mitigation strategies related to air quality, climate change and energy efficiency. Ying Jin has been building computer simulation models of cities, and using them as experimental platforms to appraise medium to long term policy and technology scenarios.

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