Dallas Section Meeting

While the meeting will be held in person, the speaker will present remotely. This provides the opportunity for participants that cannot attend in person to join remotely at 7:30 pm. If you attend in person, registration is not required. To join remotely you must register in advance: REGISTER

Topic: Carbon capture utilization and storage (1 PDH)

Carbon dioxide (CO₂) happens to be the major contributor of the greenhouse gases (GHG) to global warming. In 2020, 79% of the GHG emission from the United States was CO₂. The major sources of CO₂ emissions were the burning of fossil fuels for transportation, power production, mineral extraction & production, residential and commercial heating/cooling, and to a smaller extent due to the combustion of other non-fossil fuels such as biomass. The amount of CO₂ emitted by the power and the energy sector running on fossil fuels constitutes approximately 65% of the total emission of GHG. According to the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), human activities since the industrial revolution of 1750 have contributed significantly to climate change by adding CO₂ and other heat-trapping gases (such as CH4, N₂O and Fluorinated gases) to the atmosphere. Substantial CO₂ emission reduction was agreed upon in the Paris agreement, 2015, to maintain the global average temperature rise below 2 °C. Most of the countries have pledged to reduce their carbon footprint in the coming years and some like the UK are aiming to decarbonize their economy and achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2050. This sustainability initiative by the governments has led to strict carbon emission requirements on the energy sector. The companies are increasingly focused on bringing down their carbon emissions with the adoption of cutting edge CCUS technologies.

The prime objective of this presentation is to provide an overview of the state-of-the-art CCUS technologies and the simulation solutions available for the design and optimization of such technologies. The results obtained from the various numerical experiments/analyses performed using the Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) software ANSYS Fluent will also be presented to showcase the methodologies adopted in solving such problems. The major focus will be on absorption, adsorption and cryogenic distillation techniques and some information will also be provided on the flashing of CO₂.

Speaker: Rameche Somassoundirame, Senior Application Engineer, ANSYS

Rameche Candane Somassoundirame is a Senior Application Engineer in the Pre-Sales Support team at ANSYS, Houston. Dr. Somassoundirame received his PhD in Mechanical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras in 2007. He also holds a Master of Technology degree in Energy Technology (2003) and a Bachelor of Technology degree in Mechanical Engineering (2000) from Pondicherry Technological University, India. Prior to his current position, he worked as an Associate Research Scientist at Johns Hopkins University and as an International Research Associate at National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Gaithersburg, Maryland. Before joining JHU and NIST, he worked as an SSE Principal Engineer in the Well Controls Analysis Group of TechnipFMC (2012 - 2020), and he held postdoctoral positions at the University of La Rochelle, France (2009 - 2011) and the University of New Brunswick, Canada (2008). He also had short stints at Hindustan Lever Ltd (India), GE (India), WindSim AS (Norway), and Norsk Hydro AS (Norway). His research interests include computational heat transfer, Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), High Performance Computing (HPC), subsea engineering, wind engineering, software development, hydraulics, and structural analysis. Dr. Somassoundirame has published 23 international journal/conference papers in the areas of Computational Methods in Engineering.