(61b) A Summer Overseas Experience at the Imperial College CO2 Capture Pilot Plant

The Notre Dame administration strongly encourages departments and colleges to arrange programs for students to study outside of the US. It has an extensive organization to aid with this and owns/leases properties in about a dozen countries to support the effort. Our students embrace these opportunities with about 75% of ND students participating in some sort of international educational experience. For engineers, who have much less curricular flexibility, the participation rate is somewhat lower, about 60%, with most of these students attending 6-week summer programs in Rome, London, Alcoy Spain, Berlin, Dublin. Given the normal career progression for engineering students (almost all Notre Dame engineers graduate in 4 years), summer after Junior year is reserved for an internship, perhaps Sophomore as well, thus a great many of these students will have just finished just their first year at Notre Dame.

Five years ago we were presented with an opportunity to participate in summer courses at Imperial College London. The chemical engineering department at Imperial has what could be the only facility of its kind, a pilot-scale (50 kg/kr gas flow) carbon dioxide “capture” faculty. A nitrogen - carbon dioxide mixture is absorbed into a monoethanolamine solution in a packed tower (~7 m height), with steam regeneration in a second tower. The facility is fully-instrumented in a “catalog” sense in that different components are chosen (e.g., shell and tube, plate, spiral heat exchangers; vortex, Coriolis, swirl and Venturi flow meters, structured and dumped packing) to provide students with experience in the performance of many different types of components. Even the control systems have, Profibus, Fieldbus, 4-20 mA and some WiFi communications protocols.

Our program needed to occur after Sophomore year (first year is not possible). Students will have had the material and energy balance course, and the first thermodynamics course but no background in fluid flow, heat transfer, mass transfer, phase equilibrium or process control. All essential topics in understanding how the pilot plant operates. A similar problem exists for the companion course, a replacement for our Junior level experimental laboratory, which has a heavy emphasis on data analysis and report-writing. Almost identical academic limitations exist for the students as the normal semester for this lab course is (the 6th) spring of Junior year.

To meet these challenges, a preparation class is held one hr/week during the preceding spring semester. Lecture topics are organized around the Unit Operations, fluid flow, heat transfer, mass transfer, process control. The laboratory experiments are chosen to align with these, (1) fluid flow and measurement, (2) performance of different heat exchangers, (3) gas absorption in a small packed column and (4) Rankine cycle or vapor compression cycle. Modest amounts of homework is given focusing on getting the correct “numbers” for say, mass and heat transfer coefficients from simulated experimental and process data. An almost weekly part of the class is taken up discussing the workings of the CO2 absorption/desorption process based on the P&ID diagram — (e.g., what adjustments to flow rates or heat input would reduce the CO2 concentration in the exit gas? What temperatures are needed in the various devices?). The specific names of all of the components (e.g., H100, J101, C100, C400, etc.) — essential when students explore and operate the process — are used from start.

The talk will describe these various challenges (including report writing) and how we have adjusted the preparation course, and time at Imperial to meet them. An example of an attempt at the most efficient way to teach “mass transfer” will be given. While initially the student reports were below what was desired, the Pilot Plant grades from the Imperial College instructor have improved substantially with 2 (of the 4 submitted in the last 2 years — pilot plant groups are 12-14 students) being A’s and other two just below the A/B cut-off. Likewise, the written reports for the laboratory course (which is graded by ND faculty) have reached a level that matches what our Juniors produce.