Abstract
The environmental and social costs associated with global warming are recognized as a leading problem of this century. Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) technologies are regarded as one of the most promising strategies to reduce emissions of CO2 into the atmosphere so as to meet the Energy Union 2050 climate objectives. To this aim, new infrastructures to transport the carbon dioxide from the production to the storage sites are needed, most likely a network of pressurized pipelines. Since CO2 exhibits different characteristics during transport compared to natural gas, the minimum requirements on operating pipelines need to be redefined according to the peculiarity of CO2. One of the main challenges is represented by the onset of two-phase flow conditions due to phase change that can alter the facilities' safety and efficiency. Therefore, since the entire success of CCS relies on the competitiveness of the transport infrastructure, new engineering tools to assist engineers in the design and off-design control strategies for CO2 are required. This project integrates engineering methods to provide a systematic analysis of the single and two-phase flow of CO2 in pipelines to bring the knowledge on these processes at the level of representing effective support to CO2 transport practices for CCS technologies. Two research units (RUs) with synergistic and complementary skills propose to develop a suite of tools, based on numerical simulations, probabilistic analysis, and surrogate models, capable of predicting the evolution in space and time of the relevant flow characteristics and of identifying optimal design settings to be used in the operation practice. These innovative tools could (i) extend the state-of-art on two-fluid models embedding the thermodynamic and the transient features of two-phase flows in a consistent way, (ii) equip predictions with an appropriate level of confidence by handling the uncertainty into a rigorous probabilistic framework, (iii) identify optimum values for the design parameters in order to minimize the cost of CO2 transport and the risk of hazardous intermittent two-phase flow regimes along the pipeline. The starting points of our project are the refinement of the mathematical conceptualization of two-fluid models for CO2 transport, on one side, and the probabilistic characterization of the governing design parameters to handle their variability ranges that reflect the degree of agnosticism about their nature, on the other side. We expect to develop a numerical and uncertainty quantification software that will contribute to developing new safety standards and estimating the operating cost of the transport infrastructure for CO2. The risk analysis will assist the engineers in creating and maintaining a sustainable transport infrastructure for the CO2.
Dettagli del progetto
Responsabile scientifico: Valentina Ciriello
Strutture Unibo coinvolte:
Dipartimento di Ingegneria Civile, Chimica, Ambientale e dei Materiali
Coordinatore:
ALMA MATER STUDIORUM - Università di Bologna(Italy)
Contributo totale di progetto: Euro (EUR) 197.168,00
Contributo totale Unibo: Euro (EUR) 100.362,00
Durata del progetto in mesi: 24
Data di inizio
28/09/2023
Data di fine:
28/02/2026
