AD design and operating strategies for energy demand matching

Supervisors: Professor Mohamed Pourkashanian, Professor Lin Ma and Dr David Poggio.

The electricity grids of the future will require flexible generation technologies in order to balance the high penetration of intermittent renewables. Industrial scale AD plants are operated under steady-state conditions and therefore can be considered 'base load' generation, but this project will assess the ability of AD plants to operate in an energy demand matching regime at a number of timescales and using a variety of operational and process integration strategies.

Integrated process models will be developed building on our current work into AD modelling, drawing on the breadth of expertise in process modelling and optimisation within Energy 2050. Validation of the resulting models, process configurations and control strategies will be performed using our state of the art AD experimental facilities.

For further information contact Professor Derek B Ingham (d.ingham@sheffield.ac.uk).