The impact of process parameters on the performance of a wash column in an integrated suspension melt crystallization pilot plant

To achieve net-zero targets globally, industrial decarbonisation is a major priority. This paper examines lost energy resources in a wastewater treatment plant (WWTP) and the deployment of novel wastewater heat recovery (WWHR) technology in the food and beverage processing industry. Four industrial WWTPs were monitored in Ireland to quantify the available embedded energy. Post monitoring, WWHR technology was developed to be integrated within existing infrastructure without compromising the primary function, and evaluated in real operating conditions. On average, 1.11–2.55 GWh/a of embedded energy was measured within the wastewater. The direct WWHR pilot plant resulted in a projected recovery rate of 10.89 MWh/a, leading to substantial economic savings and emission reductions. Incorporating a water-to-water heat pump incurred energy savings of 13.5 MWh/a. Nationally, the energy recovery potential was assessed to be 82.1 GWh/a in Ireland and 476.9 GWh/a in the UK. A large proportion of the energy embedded in this wastewater remains to be recovered and, based on the monitoring campaign, could amount to 118.5 TWh/a and 20.4 TWh/a for the UK and Ireland, respectively. WWHR could serve a prominent role in increasing operational energy efficiency of manufacturing processes by enacting energy, economic and emission savings, thus leading to industrial decarbonisation.

On 14 February 2014, there was a release of radiological material at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico due to improper waste packaging. The resulting chemical reaction released 241Am as airborne contamination in the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant underground repository. This incident caused a small leak through the bypass dampers, creating effluent in an airborne plume of radiological contamination consisting of primarily 241Am. The original ground deposition was determined using validated plume modeling for the precipitation to ensure the release was below regulatory limits. Building upon this data allows for the assessment of long-term, off-site doses downwind of the facility. Using the health physics code HOTSPOT, air source terms were generated across the ground deposition plume in grid format to allow for a detailed analysis of the full scope of the ground deposition plume. The individual squares of the grid, or "kernels" were summed to calculate the dose at different offsite locations from the inhalation pathway. The lifetime integrated total effective dose equivalents (TEDEs) of these areas were all found to be, conservatively, on the order of millisievert or less and thus negligible from a radiobiological perspective. Additionally, further resuspension of this material was accounted for using three of the four different methods available in HOTSPOT. Using conservative assumptions, the wind-adjusted upper bound lifetime doses of all off-site locations were found to be substantially less than the average yearly background dose of around 3.10 mSv and are thus negligible.

The United States houses several well-funded companies devoted to developing materials and high-energy Li-ion cells based on silicon. Many of these enterprises have invested in pilot plants in recent years, suggesting that these technologies may soon enter the market. Despite the historical struggles with the volume change of Si-based materials, multiple cell developers have now been able to demonstrate fast charging capability and extended cycle life in 2-12 Ah prototypes. While Si anodes have reached a certain level of maturity, academic research remains extremely valuable in helping diagnose and mitigate the calendar aging issues that continue to plague these technologies.1 Inspection of the literature suggests that most research groups do not have access to high-performing electrodes and cells, which may limit the impact and transferability of their work to the challenges faced by manufacturers. Argonne National Laboratory’s Cell Analysis, Prototyping and Modeling Facility (CAMP) has over a decade of experience in working with Si anodes. This extensive expertise, built through numerous iterations of manufacturing and characterization, has enabled us to reliably develop high-energy silicon cells using commercially available materials. We have successfully demonstrated > 2 Ah pouch cells that achieve 1,000 cycles of life at a specific energy of > 340 Wh/kg (when scaled to automotive-relevant dimensions). In this presentation, we will discuss the solutions we developed to address various challenges, including strategies to mitigate mechanical issues and the critical role of inactive electrode components.Figure 1. Cycle life of a 2.3 Ah pouch cell containing a high-loading SiOx anode. Modeling from BatPaC indicated that building a 70 Ah automotive cell with these same electrodes would result in cell-level specific energy > 340 Wh/kg.References 1 McBrayer J. D. et al., Nature Energy 6, 866 (2021).Acknowledgments: This research was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Vehicle Technologies Office under the Silicon Consortium Project, directed by Brian Cunningham, Thomas Do, Nicolas Eidson and Carine Steinway, and managed by Anthony Burrell. Figure 1

Commercial demand for oxygen for life support and fuel production on the Moon is expected to increase exponentially in the coming years. It is estimated that demand will reach tens to one hundred tons of oxygen per year in the early 2030s. To reach this level of production, intermediate steps in the development of lunar oxygen production facilities are required. In this presentation, a preliminary system design, concept and economic viability analysis of a ROXY pilot plant producing more than one ton of oxygen per year is considered. A plant of this size must not only fulfill technical viability criteria, but must also be operable in a economically viable manner under the conditions of the lunar economy.ROXY (Regolith to Oxygen and Metals Conversion), invented and developed at Airbus Defence and Space, is a molten salt electrolysis process using the SOM (solid oxide membrane) technology. It is optimized for resource extraction on the Moon: It is capable of reducing all regolith constituents to produce metals and pure oxygen. Unlike other regolith reduction processes, ROXY has a high viability due to a high resource conversion efficiency, compatibility with the lunar vacuum, minimized need for consumables, and no need for a process gas. A miniaturized ROXY lunar demonstrator is currently under development. As a first development step, this “Mini-ROXY” facility is intended to prove the feasibility of ROXY on the Moon and deliver valuable insights for the development of larger ROXY facilities.A preliminary system design for a ROXY pilot plant on the Moon was prepared as the basis for a technical and economic analysis: In order to obtain an attractive and realistic concept and design, the performance-determining components of the system, namely the molten salt reactor with the electrochemical cell, as well as the thermal architecture and the robotics concept, were investigated in detail. A performance model was developed to assess the technical performance based on three performance metrics. These metrics relate the produced oxygen to the total mass of the plant, the mass of consumables and the power consumption. The results were used as inputs to a model assessing the economic viability of the ROXY pilot plant. The resulting plant, with a mass of just over one ton, can produce over one ton of pure oxygen and the same mass of metals per year, is capable of self-heating in stationary operation and generates almost 6 kW of excess heat. A conservative economic analysis of the plant predicts an internal rate of return of 27% and a time to break even of 3 years after commissioning.

Abstract Investigating radiated power in fusion plasmas is of utmost importance to understand the effect of undesired impurities, such as metals, in present devices, or also desired impurities, such as noble gasses, to purposefully radiate a large fraction of power in future devices. These studies are especially important for high Z impurities which will play a crucial role in future generation fusion pilot plants (FPPs). In this work, we have developed a Power Radiation Analysis Module (PRAM), which is used to investigate 2D distributions of impurity densities and radiated power asymmetries caused due to both plasma rotation and the cooling rate dependence on temperature profile for the cases of experimental NSTX plasmas and designed scenarios for the Spherical Tokamak Advanced Reactor (STAR), both being low aspect ratio tokamaks. Two different atomic databases have been tested during this work to study their impact on the radiated power distribution, especially for high Z impurities. Also in PRAM, self-consistent calculations of two-dimensional electron, main ion, and impurity ion densities are carried out using one-dimensional input density, temperature, and rotation profiles. In the case of NSTX, discharges with high rotation of ~ 170 km/s, measured with charge exchange recombination spectroscopy, have been investigated. Rotation-induced charge separation, leading to an electrostatic potential, is calculated iteratively to a self-consistent solution while testing high Z impurities to observe any 2D asymmetry in the core radiated power due to centrifugal forces. The STAR design, being much larger (R=4 m), is projected to have a much lower rotation, and is shown to have low rotation-induced asymmetries, on the order of ten percent or less, between the low field and high field sides. However, another effect not due to rotation but to the dependence of impurity cooling rates on temperature can lead to radiation peaking off-axis, near the plasma edge. This effect is noticeable for argon in NSTX, for example, but can also be enhanced for certain impurities at much higher temperatures projected for STAR (T e0 ~ 32 keV), for example for undesired tungsten or possibly desired xenon.

Implementation of an extended NMPC controller integrated with nonlinear state estimators in an oil well pilot plant with electrical submersible pump installations

Scaling up microbial electrolysis cells (MECs) for hydrogen production: Design, construction and operation of a 1 m3 pilot plant in an urban wastewater treatment plant

Optimizing pilot plant flux by harnessing loach metabolism to overcome biocake steric hindrance.

Innovative nickel-based catalyst doped with perovskite-type CaCeOx for efficient Bi-reforming of biogas: From laboratory to pilot plant

Exploring the circularity of brine valorisation through neural network modelling of an electrodialysis with bipolar membranes pilot plant

In industrial process installations, the improper operation or misconfiguration of safety-critical components, such as manually operated ball valves, can seriously compromise both process performance and plant safety. This work proposes a sensorless Edge AI method to estimate hand-operated ball valves states without the use of physical position sensors. Using multivariate time-series data collected from a PLC-based pilot plant, a benchmark evaluation is conducted comparing four Deep Learning (DL) and four classical Machine Learning (ML) models for classification and regression tasks. The models are deployed on an embedded platform, enabling real-time inference at the edge with a minimum latency of 500ms. Results show Decision Tree (DT) and Random Forest (RF) achieve high regression accuracy (R2 >0.98, MAE < 0.5), while all eight model reach high classification accuracy. Additionally, the computational efficiency metric that combines model accuracy, latency, and size, confirming DT as the most efficient model (1.83/(ms.KB) for edge deployment. This work contributes a cost-effective and scalable monitoring strategy, particularly suitable for complex industrial environments where physical sensing and visual inspection are limited, offering a viable path toward early anomaly detection and intelligent supervision within cyber-physical systems. • Key Words: Edge AI, machine learning, deep neural networks, cyber-physical systems, industrial valves, PLC, embedded inference.

Emergency losses from transporting oil and oil products by water tankers caused by man-made disasters reach 30 tons per 1 million tons of transported oil. One of the important tasks when implementing a set of measures to eliminate the consequences of emergency situations caused by oil spills is their collection (including cleaning the coastal zone) and disposal. Incineration in boiler units is a promising method of disposal. The study of the possibility of separating fuel oil from a sand and gravel mixture, as well as the preparation and combustion of water-fuel oil emulsion (WFOE) has been conducted on a pilot industrial facility at the Center for Innovative Coal Technologies (CICT) of the Siberian State Industrial University and Scientific and Production Center “Sibecotechnika”. The fuel oil-sand and gravel mixture used as material under examination was collected at a temporary storage site as part of the cleanup of the fuel oil spill in the Kerch Strait on December 15, 2024. The authors have developed technological schemes to clean sand-gravel mixture from fuel oil, prepare WFOE and a boiler unit for its combustion. During the research it was established that for effective separation of fuel oil from sand and gravel mass it is necessary to actively mix fuel oil-sand and gravel mass with water in the ratio of 1:1,5 by weight at the temperature of not less than 50 °С. As a reagent the authors have used calcined soda (Na2CO3) in the amount of 1 % of the aqueous phase. The reagent solution is prepared in the reagent preparation unit, and the obtained water-fuel oil-sand and gravel mixture is separated in the gravity separator. To obtain a stable water-fuel oil emulsion it is necessary to have the ratio fuel oil : water = 40:60 (by weight), at the temperature of not less than 50 °С. As the equipment it is recommended to use a twin-screw mixer and a cavitator pump. A series of experiments on the combustion of a prepared pilot batch of WFOE on a pilot industrial installation have confirmed the high technical, economic and environmental performance of the developed technology. A promising direction for the utilization of fuel oil-sand-gravel mass collected during the cleaning of the coastal zone from oil spill products as a result of the tanker accident in December 2024 in the Kerch Strait is its use as fuel for boiler units. As a result of a series of experiments on WFOE combustion on a bench pilot plant, the practical feasibility of using this technology has been confirmed, and a technical, economic and environmental assessment of its prospects has been carried out.

In many decarbonization scenarios, heat pumps are seen as a key technology for future heating needs. However, market shares for large-capacity heat pumps are still low despite the potential for significant CO2 reduction. In particular, boiler replacements face the obstacle of insufficient heat sources due to restrictions imposed by the built environment. In this study, overcoming the restriction of individual heat sources through dual-source integration has been investigated, both by simulation and field monitoring. The results confirm that by downsizing the individual heat sources, limitations relating to noise emissions or drilling space can be overcome. For instance, by combining the ground as a heat source for 50% of the peak load coverage with outdoor air as the base load heat source, the length of the borehole heat exchanger can be reduced by up to 80% compared to when using only the ground as a heat source. Through regeneration of the ground, boreholes can be drilled closer together, and their length can be reduced by more than 50%. Cost-optimal regeneration rates were found to be between 40 and 80%. The related cost savings can make the dual-source system more cost-effective than a single-source system, even without limitations on any individual heat source. Simulation results are verified in a pilot and demonstration (P&D) plant for a boiler replacement in two larger multi-family homes. The first winter measurements confirm the basic simulation results. CO2 saving potentials are estimated to be around 90%. Ongoing monitoring will further verify results and derive standard configurations and best practices.

A gram-scalable synthesis of C30-buckybowls derived from 1 and the first example of desymmetrization to a chiral semifullerene are presented, together with experimental and theoretically determined chiroptical and electronic properties. Chiral hemifullerenes as scaffolds for creating new ligands, receptors, sensors, and catalysts capable of stereoselective functions with remarkable configurational stability are a clear next step in the development of these curved aromatics. The optimized process enables gram-scale production of 1 and 2, with potential for further scale-up using a modern pilot plant infrastructure, making these compounds practical for developing new materials.

Abstract The degradation of Reactive Black 5 (RB5) dye in a solar pilot plant has been compared where reflective surfaces were added to the reactor to increase solar irradiation. Taking the tubular reactor as a reference, the effect of adding two types of reflective surfaces with different geometry was analyzed: one of the surfaces consisted of composite parabolic concentrators (CPCs) and the other of a flat reflective surface placed under the tube array. Photocatalytic reaction conditions were considered, with TiO 2 and the TiO 2 /rGO nanocomposite as photocatalysts, as well as without catalyst under photolysis conditions. A pseudo first order kinetic model was used to interpret the results, a function of the intensity of solar irradiation and the area of the tube irradiated, both directly and reflected. To estimate the area of the reactor irradiated by the reflecting surfaces, the ray tracing technique was used. For both catalysts, the highest degradation rates occurred in the presence of CPC-type surfaces. From the apparent kinetic constants, an increase of about 11 % was found for the presence of the flat reflective plate and up to 65 % for the CPC, both with respect to the tubular reactor and nanocomposite material. Based on ray tracing analysis, and according to solar time, the active area reflecting rays on the surface of the reactor was, for the CPC, in the order of 50 % greater than that of the flat reflective plate, which was consistent with the kinetic results between both systems.

Methyl ester co-solvent will accelerate the reaction without the need for a separation stage at the end of the reaction. The study aims to determine the effect of FAME co-solvent concentration and time of reaction on the methyl ester produced in the interesterification reaction of palm oil into biodiesel with methyl ester co-solvent. The weight of the oil used was 250 g, the mole ratio of oil: methyl acetate = 1:6, the temperature was 60oC, the concentration of the co-solvent (0 - 20%), the reaction time (30-90 min), the catalyst KOH 1% and the stirring speed was 800 rpm. The oil, methyl acetate and catalyst were placed in a three-necked flask and the reaction was carried out according to the operating conditions. The optimum conditions were obtained in the palm oil interesterification process with a FAME co-solvent concentration of 20% and a time of reaction of 30 min with a methyl ester concentration of 61,413 mg/L and an acid value of 0.28 mg KOH/g which met SNI 7182-2015. The research revealed a biodiesel production process with fewer steps, faster reaction times, higher yields, and product physical properties that meet standards. It is hoped that this process can be implemented at a pilot plant scale, bringing the selling price of biodiesel closer to that of diesel fuel.

Analyses of the radiation fields from deuterium-tritium (D-T) fusion reactions are crucial for the success of fusion pilot plant designs. For this effort, Monte Carlo methods have been the standard choice for neutronics analysis of fusion reactors due to their ability to handle complex geometries and highly anisotropic fluxes. In order to support blanket development in Europe, two mock-up experiments were developed based on the helium-cooled pebble bed (HCPB) and the helium-cooled lithium lead blanket designs. The focus of this study is the Frascati Neutron Generator (FNG) HCPB mock-up benchmark, available in the Shielding Integral Benchmark Archive and Database (SINBAD). Originally, the experimental data from the FNG HCPB were compared to the computational results from MCNP-4C to validate MCNP and quantify nuclear data uncertainties. The open-source Monte Carlo code OpenMC is a powerful and flexible tool for simulating neutron and photon transport and analyzing nuclear systems. This study aims to benchmark it against experimental measurements and computational results. An OpenMC model was generated by converting the MCNP input file into geometry and material files using the openmc_mcnp_adapter. Additionally, a method has been developed by our team to build a FNG neutron source with neutron source characteristics that are importable as an OpenMC source object. Here we use OpenMC to compute the tritium production rate (TPR) in lithium carbonate (Li2CO3) pellets within the HCPB and the activation foil reaction rates and compare the results to experimental and computational (TPR only) data available in SINBAD. Additionally, nuclear data uncertainty quantification is performed via the Total Monte Carlo method for various cross sections in 6Li, 7Li, and 9Be using the SANDY (Sampler of Nuclear Data and uncertaintY) package. The TPR results agree well with the computational results from MCNP-4C, and underestimate the experimental data by 9 % on average due in large part to 9Be cross-section uncertainties. The reaction rate results agree well with experimental data with the exception of the 197Au(n,γ) reaction, which showed a consistent discrepancy among all nuclear libraries applied to this study.

Correction to “Emissions with Various Water Wash Configurations during Pilot Plant Testing of Aqueous Piperazine for CO₂ Capture”

ABSTRACT Pharmaceutical manufacturers are under increasing pressure to reduce energy consumption and enhance sustainability to meet net-zero emission targets. Achieving these goals requires advanced methodologies capable of capturing complex process dynamics and driving realtime optimisation. Industry 4.0 technologies – particularly Digital Twins (DTs) – offer significant potential, yet their effectiveness can be limited by undetected process anomalies and subtle energy-performance deviations. This study presents a novel DT integrated framework that combines energy management techniques, statistical monitoring, and a newly defined Energy Performance Indicator (EnPI) to optimise a semicontinuous fluidised bed dryer (FBD) within the GEA Consigma25 line at the Diamond Pilot Plant, University of Sheffield. Realtime experimental data and DT outputs were analysed using CUSUM (Cumulative Sum) deviation analysis, enabling sensitive detection of energy-moisture performance shifts that the DT alone could not identify. Results highlight 60°C as the optimal drying air temperature, delivering superior energy efficiency across liquid-to-solid ratios of 0.18 and 0.30, with opportunities for further refinement within the 50–60°C range. By bridging gaps in realtime multi‑objective monitoring, this integrated approach provides actionable insights for energy-efficient, quality-driven process control and establishes a scalable pathway towards sustainable pharmaceutical manufacturing.