Thermo-Economic Analysis Team
Design Team
CFD and 3D Visualization Team
Dynamics and Controls Team
Optics Team
Reaction Engineering Team
Energy Management and Policy Team
The thermo-economic analysis team works on the assessment of different hydrogen production processes by giving particular focus on solar thermal cracking of natural gas. The team develops process-step level energy and cost analysis via energy and material flow modeling using a various software such as AspenPlus. The data for the analysis is collected from literature, various vendors, and personal communications with people from industry and universities. The results are presented for unit hydrogen production by each technique and compared with the market price for hydrogen.
The design team is in charge of CAD drawing of all reactors, reactor support systems, solar simulator support system, reactor parts, manufacturing of the designs, iteration of the designs, assembly and testing of parts.
The CFD and 3D visualization team is in charge of developing Computational Fluid Dynamics simulations of solar thermal cracking of natural gas process in various solar reactors using Texas A&M Qatar supercomputing facilities. The team is also in charge of coupling the CFD results with the Immersive Visualization Facilities tools of Texas A&M Qatar to create three dimensional videos of the phenomena. Currently Texas A&M Qatar supercomputing facilities has 600 cores, 6.5 Tflops of processing capacity, 2TB of memory and 60 TB of disk space, which is perfectly designed to support full parallel and distributed computing as well as serial computing.
The dynamics and controls team is in charge of developing control systems to tests various solar reactors and aperture mechanisms. They use virtual prototyping to check the control system implemented while running experiments to identify the drawbacks of the mechanism and loop holes in the control system. They use various software including LabVIEW to design a control system.
The optics team is in charge of installation and testing of our 5kW solar simulator, characterization of solar simulator, simulations using TracePro to map irradiance, taking measurements from the receiver, replicating weather conditions, estimation of flux distribution at the opening of the receiver, and optimization of the solar simulator-solar reactor system.
The reaction engineering team is in charge of running thermogravimeter to find out kinetics of various catalysts to use in solar thermal decomposition such as CMK3, CMK 5, Fluka etc. The team is also in charge of running experiments using quartz solar reactor to test various catalysts to study their effect on the methane decomposition.
The energy management and policy team works on assessing the benefits of hydrogen production via solar cracking in refineries, calculation of quantitative profits from no-CO2 emission, research on existing carbon taxation policies and development of suggestions for improved policies to save energy and to reduce hazardous emissions.
>>Thermo-Economic Analysis
>>Design
>>CFD and 3D Visualization
>>Dynamics & Controls
>>Optics
>>Reaction Engineering
>>Energy Management & Policy
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Sustainable Energy Research Laboratory (SERL) at Texas A&M University at Qatar
Office Number: 241B
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