Today was the last seminar of Lent term, and Part III student James Fidler presented his recent work on new catalyst materials for hydrogen production through electrolysis. Nobel metals are very expensive, and so research is ongoing to find affordable alternatives for catalyst production. Under the supervision of professor Clarke, James has been investigating the
Professor Matthew Jackson from Imperial College London visited us today and presented his recent work on Aquifer Thermal Energy Storage (ATES) systems. This underground thermal energy storage technology provides large capacity, low carbon heating and cooling to the built environment. Heating and cooling of buildings currently produces 23% of the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions, and
To celebrate his recent submission, PhD student Sam Clarke presented some of the results of his work at the weekly seminar today. During his time at the Institute, Sam has been working on reactive flows through porous rocks, with particular interest in the flows which develop around nuclear waste disposal sites. Nuclear waste items need
Professor Matthew Davidson is the director of the Institute of Sustainability and Climate Change of the University of Bath. He visited us today and discussed some of the challenges in making the chemical industry more sustainable and less dependent on fossil resources. Whereas decarbonisation of the energy sector is feasible through the development of
Methane availability is crucial to the energy transition. Currently, most hydrogen is produced by steam methane reforming, a carbon-intensive process. A small amount of green hydrogen is being obtained from the electrolysis of water; however, for this carbon-free hydrogen to become prevalent, electrolysis must become much more efficient than it currently is. PhD student James
Professor Daniel Fuster is the CNRS Research Director at the Institut d’Alembert, and works at Sorbonne University in Paris. He visited us today, and presented his recent work on the collapse of non-spherical bubbles. Professor Fuster’s work was motivated by some interesting laboratory observations. In the experiments, a pulse of laser energy is used to
Professor Alex Routh has long been interested in colloidal suspensions, and today he told us about some of his recent work in the field. When a pool of fluid containing a suspension of particles is left to dry, the liquid slowly evaporates and the particles consolidate into a solid, which eventually cracks. We can see
Professor Yulong Ding visited us from the University of Birmingham today, and gave the first seminar of Lent term. The title of the seminar was: “Multiphase Transport Phenomena and Energy Process Intensification”. He started by talking about a few energy storage techniques which have been developed by his group over the years, including liquid air
Today, PhD student Emily Flicos delivered our weekly seminar, with a presentation titled ‘CCS & permeability: thinking about uncertainty through a perturbation analysis’. Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) has a crucial role to play in the journey to Net Zero and represents an enormous challenge due to the scale of storage that we must meet.
Professor Alex Routh gave a fascinating seminar this week on the production process of rubber gloves. It’s a subject that not many of us think about, but the scale and significance of rubber glove manufacture is enormous. 300 billion latex gloves are produced globally every year, and the process is far from environmentally friendly or