Alberto Giaconia

Development of a Solar-Powered, Fuel-Flexible Compact Steam Reformer: The CoMETHy Project

bProcessi Innovativi Srl. (Italy); c Acktar Ltd. (Israel); d Technion - Israel Institute of Technology (Israel); e Fraunhofer Institute for Ceramic Technologies and Systems (Germany); f University of Salerno (Italy); g Centre for

HycycleS: a project on nuclear and solar hydrogen production by sulphur-based thermochemical cycles

The European FP7 project HycycleS focuses on providing detailed solutions for the design of specific key components for sulphur-based thermochemical cycles for hydrogen production. The key components necessary for the high temperature part of those processes, the thermal decomposition of H2SO4, are a compact heat exchanger for SO3 decomposition for operation by solar and nuclear heat, a receiver-reactor for solar H2SO4 decomposition, and membranes as product separator and as promoter of the SO3 decomposition. Silicon carbide has been identified as the preferred construction material. Its stability is tested at high temperature and in a highly corrosive atmosphere. Another focus is catalyst materials for the reduction of SO3. Requirement specifications were set up as basis for design and sizing of the intended prototypes. Rigs for corrosion tests, catalyst tests and selectivity of separation membranes have been designed, built and completed. Prototypes of the mentioned components have been designed and tested.

Life Cycle Assessment of a High Temperature Molten Salt Concentrated Solar Power Plant

The well-known world energetic matter, mainly due to the worldwide growing energy consumption gone with a reduction of oil and gas availability, and to the environmental effects of the indiscriminate use of fossil fuels in our economy, is leading to the development of clean innovative technologies for the reduction of GHG emissions and the creation of a more sustainable economic structure worldwide. But, realizing and installing renewable energy plants have an environmental “footprint” that has to be evaluated to quantify the real impact of renewable technologies on the environment. Nowadays, the most important tool to evaluate this impact of a product is the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). To this aim, several impact categories are defined; among these the most important are the Global Warming, the Abiotic Depletion, the Eutrophication, the Acidification, the Land Use and the Human toxicity. The aim of this work is to present a Life Cycle Assessment of an innovative solar technology, the Molten Salt Concentrating Solar Power (CSP) plant, developed by Italian Research Centre ENEA and able to produce clean electricity by using solar energy. The Life Cycle Assessment was carried out by means of the SimaPro7 software, one of the most used LCA software in the world. It is worth assess that these types of software are an indispensable tools for leading LCA studies. In the second part of the study the environmental performance of the CSP plant was compared with th ese of conventional oil and gas power plants.

Robust Mesoporous CoMo/γ-Al2O3 Catalysts from Cyclodextrin-Based Supramolecular Assemblies for Hydrothermal Processing of Microalgae: Effect of the Preparation Method

Hydrothermal liquefaction (HTL) is a promising technology for the production of biocrude oil from microalgae. Although this catalyst-free technology is efficient under high-temperature and high-pressure conditions, the biocrude yield and quality can be further improved by using heterogeneous catalysts. The design of robust catalysts that preserve their performance under hydrothermal conditions will be therefore very important in the development of biorefinery technologies. In this work, we describe two different synthetic routes (i.e., impregnation and cyclodextrin-assisted one-pot colloidal approach), for the preparation in aqueous phase of six high surface area CoMo/γ-Al2O3 catalysts. Catalytic tests performed on the HTL of Nannochloropsis gaditana microalga indicate that solids prepared by the one-pot colloidal approach show higher hydrothermal stability and enhanced biocrude yield with respect to the catalyst-free test. The positive effect of the substitution of the block copolymer Tetronic T90R4 for Pluronic F127 in the preparation procedure was evidenced by diffuse reflectance UV-visible spectroscopy, X-ray diffraction, N2-adsorption-desorption, and H2-temperature-programmed reduction measurements and confirmed by the higher quality of the obtained biocrude, which exhibited lower oxygen content and higher-energy recovery equal to 62.5% of the initial biomass.

Time-on-stream stability of new catalysts for low-temperature steam reforming of biogas

Time-on-stream stability of six different steam reforming catalysts has been tested at 500 °C under a simulated biogas feed. The catalysts are based on different combinations of Ni, Pt and Rh as active species, and CeO₂, ZrO₂ and La₂O₃ as support. In order to perform a conservative analysis, biogas was simulated with a 50 % v/v CO2-CH4 mixture; furthermore a steam to methane ratio as low as 2.5 has also been used. All the samples containing CeO₂ in the support proved fairly stable up to 50 h on stream. Therefore, these catalysts are worth being further investigated to assess their activity and determine appropriate reaction rate expressions.

Modification of Polymers in Supercritical Carbon Dioxide

The interaction of scFluids and polymers are governed by the intermolecular forces between solvent-solvent, solvent-polymer segment, and polymer segment-segment pairs. Because of its symmetry, within reasonable pressure values, CO2 does not have a dipole moment, but it does have a quadrupole moment significant over a much shorter distance than dipolar interactions. The quadrupole moment and the Lewis acidity of CO2 imparts to the carbon dioxide the peculiarity to be a solvent for selected classes of polymers like perfluorinated polyacrylates, polysiloxanes and polyether-polycarbonate diblock copolymers [1–3].

Polymer Synthesis in Supercritical Carbon Dioxide

It is current opinion of most of the people involved in supercritical fluids (SCFs) technology that as the end of the twentieth century has been devoted to enlarge exploitation of compressed gases in separation processes the beginning of the twenty-first will be mainly aimed to improve their utilisation as solvents for reactions.

Co-generation and innovative heat storage systems in small-medium CSP plants for distributed energy production

CSP technologies can be applied for distributed energy production, on small-medium plants (on the 1 MW scale), to satisfy the needs of local communities, buildings and districts. In this perspective, reliable, low-cost, and flexible small/medium multi-generative CSP plants should be developed. Four pilot plants have been built in four Mediterranean countries (Cyprus, Egypt, Jordan, and Italy) to demonstrate the approach. In this paper, the plant built in Italy is presented, with specific innovations applied in the linear Fresnel collector design and the Thermal Energy Storage (TES) system, based on a single the use of molten salts but specifically tailored for small scale plants.

Conceptual study of the coupling of a biorefinery process for hydrothermal liquefaction of microalgae with a concentrating solar power plant

A conceptual analysis of the coupling of a concentrating solar power plant with a chemical process for hydrothermal liquefaction (HTL) of microalgae to biocrude was performed. The two plants were considered coupled by molten salt recirculation that granted energetic supply to the chemical process. Preliminary estimations have been done considering a solar field constituted by 3 linear parabolic solar collectors rows, each 200 m long, using a ternary molten salts mixture as heat transfer fluid, and a chemical plant sized to process 10 kT/y of microalgae. Under adopted conditions, we have estimated a minimum selling prize of the biocrude that is similar to that achieved in non-solar HTL processes.

Annual simulation of the thermal performance of solar power plant for electricity production using TRNSYS

ASME 2016 10th International Conference on Energy Sustainability, ES 2016, collocated with the ASME 2016 Power Conference and the ASME 2016 14th International Conference on Fuel Cell Science, Engineering and Technology