Event Date
The Science of Scaleup: Finding the Critical Path for Emerging Climate Technologies.
The science is clear-in the next 25 years we must undertake the most rapid energy transition in history to avoid the worst impacts of climate change. For our lab-scale innovations to matter, we must accelerate the scaleup and development process. Technology development toward real-world application necessarily involves increases in scale or number, where emergent scaling behaviors must be identified and overcome. Often, a project’s funding ends before the critical risks and scaling behaviors are identified, or a time and resource-intensive trial and error approach focused on incremental scaling in size consumes project resources but is focused on the wrong bottleneck. During my presentation, I will share our progress toward developing an approach to accelerating technology development along the critical path. I will also describe how we are applying current manufacturing, data integration, and computational advancements toward more rapid discovery and mitigation of emergent scaling behaviors to de-risk scaleup. Finally, I will share our progress toward scaling up two flow reactor technologies, one for conversion of carbon dioxide to ethylene, and another for post combustion carbon capture.