Piyush Verma

Piyush Verma holds a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering and technology from the Indian Institute of Technology (BHU), Varanasi. He worked at Reliance Industries Limited from 2014–2016 as a design engineer for gasification technology, and joined Washington University in St. Louis and LACER in 2016.

Research
CO2 capture, utilization and storage (CCUS) is expected to play a significant role in mitigating the effect of CO2 in climate change. The large-scale development of these technologies is limited by their high energy consumption, leading to a large loss in power plant efficiency. LACER has developed a staged pressurized oxy-combustion process that promises high efficiency compared to other contemporary and first-generation oxy-combustion technologies.

Still, an optimized process is required to understand the effect of various parameters. This includes the effects of the CO2 recycle ratio, heat integration and latent heat captured in the integrated SOx and NOx removal. Process modeling is a great tool for understanding these parameters. Apart from this, evaluation of the process for the ultra-supercritical and advanced ultra-supercritical Rankine cycle is important for understanding the efficiencies gain offered by this process for these steam conditions. This research also plans to venture into combining the supercritical CO2 cycle with the staged pressurized oxy-combustion process.

The pressurized oxy-combustion process produces a CO2 stream contaminated with SOx and NOx, which must be removed before the compression of CO2. LACER is trying to develop the chemistry for SOx and NOx removal in a bench-scale experiment, as well as evaluate the performance of a direct contact cooler for SOx and NOx removal. The chemistry in a pressurized system is significantly different from that in an atmospheric system. Modeling of both of these reactors along with the experimental results can provide us with great insight in understanding the workings of integrated SOx and NOx removal, and will ultimately help in development of this technology.