Improving plant-level heat pump performance through process modifications

Heat pumps are a promising option to decarbonize the industrial sector. However, their performance at a plant-level can be affected by other process changes. In this work, process changes that improve the heat pump's performance have been identified using Process Change Analysis (PCA), where the background pinch point is used as a reference...

Impact of intermittent electricity supply on a conceptual process design for microbial conversion of CO₂ into hexanoic acid

Combining intermittent renewable electricity (IRE) with carbon capture and utilisation is urgently needed in the chemical sector. In this context, microbial electrosynthesis (MES) has gained attention. It can electrochemically produce hexanoic acid, a value-added chemical, from CO₂. However, there is a lack of understanding...

Fully integrated CO₂ mitigation strategy for an existing refinery: A case study in Colombia

The oil and gas industry is responsible for 6% of total global CO2 emissions, from exploration to downstream petrochemical production and account for another 50% when including the use of its products. Thus, this industry has a significant role in realising the target of net “zero” CO2 emissions by 2070, essential to limit global warming to 1.8 ...

Assessing bio-oil co-processing routes as CO₂ mitigation strategies in oil refineries

The oil industry needs to reduce CO₂ emissions across the entire lifecycle of fossil fuels to meet environmental regulations and societal requirements and to sustain its business. With this goal in mind, this study aims to evaluate the CO₂ mitigation potential of several bio-oil co-processing pathways in an oil refinery....

Impact of fuel selection on the environmental performance of post-combustion calcium looping applied to a cement plant

Calcium looping CO₂ capture is a promising technology to reduce CO₂ emissions from cement production. Coal has been seen as a logical choice of fuel to drive the calcium looping process as coal is already the primary fuel used to produce cement. This study assesses the impact of using different fuels, namely coal,...

Conceptual design of sustainable integrated microalgae biorefineries: Parametric analysis of energy use, greenhouse gas emissions and techno-economics

This study covers four main aspects of the conceptual design of sustainable integrated microalgae-based biorefineries using flue gas from CO2-intensive industries (i.e. 100% CO2): i) screening of technologies (4 options for cultivation, 3 for culture dewatering, 3 for cell disruption, 4 for lipids extraction & purification, and 4 for...

Parallel Scalability of Video Decoders

An important question is whether emerging and future applications exhibit sufficient parallelism, in particular thread-level parallelism, to exploit the large numbers of cores future chip multiprocessors (CMPs) are expected to contain. As a case study we investigate the parallelism available in video decoders, an important application domain now...