Events

Biomass plays a key role in capturing and storing solar energy on Earth. It is estimated that up to 8,500 exjoules (×10¹⁸ joules) of solar energy are captured and stored globally each year through biomass, which is about 10-15 times the current global energy consumption (580 exajoules). This presentation provides an overview of the availability of biomass and organic solid waste resources globally, as well as in Chinese mainland and Hong Kong, and introduces hydrothermal technologies and their applications in the transformation of biomass and organic solid waste. During these transformations, water is used as a reaction medium, solvent, reactant, or catalyst. Hydrothermal technology is especially suitable for the resource utilization of high-moisture biomass and biowaste (such as food waste, sewage sludge, manure slurry, microalgae, etc.), as it eliminates the costly dehydration/drying process (which is essential for other thermochemical processes like combustion, pyrolysis, and gasification). This presentation summarizes Professor Xu's team's past research achievements in various hydrothermal technology development, including methanol aqueous phase reforming (APR) for hydrogen production, biomass hydrothermal carbonization (HTC) to produce water-charcoal, hydrothermal liquefaction of biomass waste (HTL) to produce biocrude oil, and supercritical water gasification (SCWG) of aqueous biomass (sugars) to produce green hydrogen. Professor Xu will also share his experience in scaling HTL technology to 6 kg/h and 100 kg/h, as well as ongoing commercialization efforts, including building pilot units with a daily throughput of 10 tons and demonstration units with a daily throughput of 100 tons.

Abstract
The simulation of flows using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) has advanced considerably in recent decades and is now an essential tool across industries ranging from aerospace design to process engineering. Although CFD is relatively mature for single-phase flows, multiphase flows (such as particle-laden flows) and multiphysics flows (such as those including microwaves or ultrasound) remain significantly more challenging to simulate, in part due to their intrinsic multiscale nature and conflicting numerical need.

In the recent years, high-order methods have gained considerable momentum in aeronautics, in part due to their significantly lower dispersion and dissipation, but also for their higher arithmetic intensity (FLOPS-to-byte ratio) which suits current hardware capabilities. However, these methods remain seldomly used in chemical-engineering applications, in part due to their multiphase and multiphysics nature.

 

Enhancing Polyglycolic Acid Production in E.coli