PhD Studentship: Solutions for Carbon Capture and Storage - Quadrupolar Solvency and Association

Length: 4 year stipend (at £21,237/y)

Application deadline: 15 Oct 2022.

International fees covered, overseas applicants welcome.

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is hoped to provide a major chunk (55% by some estimates) of humanity's effort to deal with the climate crisis. The cost of equipping large plants (power, ammonia, cement, steel) with facilities for CCS is mainly related to purification of the CO₂ stream to specifications set by corrosion limits for the transport stage. These specifications are currently prohibitively stringent for many businesses and ways to relax them are urgently sought for.

This situation requires an understanding of the corrosion processes that take place upon mixing streams from different plants, containing various levels of H₂S, SO_x, NO_x, water: these impurities interact to form corrosive acids, to phase-separate sulfur etc. The operators of the CCS facilities cannot investigate the vast number of mixing scenarios experimentally and, therefore, reliable modelling tools for the chemistry taking place are needed.

The focus of this PhD scholarship is on the radical chemistry in industrial CO₂ streams, including the association of nitrogen oxides and the rate of the redox reactions that they initialize. The student will investigate the effect of the CO₂ medium on the association equilibria, the radical chain processes that the nitrogen oxides initiate, and the ways to mitigate the formation of corrosive products. This is modelling work. Experience in chemical thermodynamics, chemical kinetics, chemical process engineering, computer algebra and process simulation packages is a plus. The student will regularly communicate with a team of industrial and academic partners.

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