Reaction Design will develop gasification and reaction kinetics simulation software to help solve engineering and operating problems that arise throughout the lifecycle of a power plant.
Project funding comes from the National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL), within the DOE’s Office of Fossil Energy, with a mission to develop next-generation power plants. Reaction Design will conduct research and develop simulation capabilities aimed at enhancing the performance of next-generation fossil energy power systems.
Bernie Rosenthal, CEO of Reaction Design, said: “Coal combustion is widely used by the electric power industry, so it is critical for us to investigate how to optimize the gasification process to allow more environmentally responsible use of fossil-based fuels. This project builds our proven successes in using high-fidelity chemical-kinetics modeling to analyze complex systems, such as combustion in engines used for transportation and gas turbine-based power generation systems.”
Integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC) with carbon capture is environmentally friendly method of electrical generation from coal. However, improvements within power plant economics are said to be required to make this technology acceptable to the market. The focus of the project is to develop a simulation methodology that can enable cost-effective exploration of options that improve the gasification processes at the core of IGCC technology.
Reaction Design will develop a form of reduced-order models that represent unit operations in flow-sheet simulations. The company plans to extend its ENERGICO product, which uses technology to automatically extract equivalent reactor networks (ERNs) from a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation. A component of the project will be to encapsulate the high-fidelity ERNs as CAPE OPEN–compliant objects that can be used in general flow-sheet simulation software.
