Monday, March 26
Reception at 3 p.m.: Knowledge Rooms at the Elson S. Floyd Cultural Center
Seminar at 4:10 p.m.: Living Room at the Elson S. Floyd Cultural Center
The Gene and Linda Voiland School of Chemical Engineering and Bioengineering presents the 2018 Ensor Lectureship featuring L.-S. Fan, Distinguished University Professor at Ohio State University.
L.-S. Fan is Distinguished University Professor and C. John Easton Professor in Engineering in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at The Ohio State University. He has been on the faculty of Chemical Engineering at Ohio State since 1978 and served as Department Chair from 1994 – 2003. Professor Fan received his B.S. (1970) from National Taiwan University, and his M.S. (1973) and Ph.D. (1975) from West Virginia University, all in Chemical Engineering. In addition, he earned an M.S. (1978) in Statistics from Kansas State University.
Professor Fan’s expertise is in fluidization and multiphase flow, powder technology and energy and environmental reaction engineering. He is an inventor of 7 industrially viable clean fossil conversion processes: OSCAR, CARBONOX, PH Swing, CCR, Calcium Looping, Syngas and Coal-Direct Chemical Looping Processes. These processes control sulfur, nitrogen oxide and carbon dioxide emissions and convert carbonaceous fuels to hydrogen, electricity or liquid fuels. He also invented the electrical capacitance volume tomography for 3-dimensional, real time multiphase flow imaging that is currently being used in academia and industry. Professor Fan is the Editor-in-Chief of Powder Technology and has served as a consulting editor of ten other journals and book series, including the AIChE Journal, I&EC Research, and the International Journal of Multiphase Flow. He has authored or co-authored five books, 420 journal papers, and 55 patents.
Chemical Looping Technology for Combustion, Gasification, Reforming, and Chemical Syntheses
Chemical looping technology is a manifestation of the interplay among a broad spectrum of science and engineering subjects in connection to metal oxide physics, chemistry and reaction engineering, and particle science and technology. These subjects encompass three main components – Materials: metal oxide material synthesis, reactivity, redox mechanism recyclability, and physical strength; Reactors: flow pattern and stability, gas-solid contact mechanics, scaling rule; and Systems: process integration, intensification, and optimization. Such interplay is so complex that it has been over 100 years in which this technology has not been able to be commercially deployed.
However, with major advances made recently on the bottleneck areas in this technology development, the technology commercialization is now realistically possible and can be projected to take place in the near future. These advances include the successful development of chemically, physically robust metal oxide oxygen carriers that are cost-effective and sustainable to long-term redox reactor environment, and the successful employment of CO2 and H2O as partial substitute of carbonaceous feedstock for combustion, gasification and reforming applications thereby yielding CO2 negative chemical looping processes. The details of this work were recently reported in articles at Energy and Environmental Sciences. These advances coupled with a novel reactor system design and operation give rise to a significant reduction in the capex compared to conventional approaches, when the chemical looping technology is used for carbonaceous feedstock conversions in the production of electricity, hydrogen, syngas, liquid fuels, and chemicals. This presentation will describe these advances that are established over the OSU moving-bed based chemical looping system platform. The presentation will also illustrate the rationales of its commercialization timeline with relevance to that for the fluidized bed-based chemical looping technology.
