Friday, 4 October 2024 11:00am – 12:00pm

This seminar will be delivered in Lecture Theatre 4

Speaker: Professor Niket Kaisare

Host: Dr Marcello Solomon

Title: CO2 Capture and Utilization: A cross-disciplinary multi-scale approach

Abstract: Achieving net carbon-zero goal is challenging. It requires collaboration across multiple disciplines and analysis spanning multiple time and length scales. I will present a few results from interdisciplinary work from our group, broadly in the area of CO2 capture and utilisation. The first example will focus on adsorptive capture of CO2 on metal organic framework (MOF). One of the MOFs of interest, ZIF-7, shows the so-called “gate-opening” in the presence of CO2. Crystal size -dependent gate opening behaviour in ZIF-7 will be analysed. The second example will present a multi-scale approach for thermocatalytic reduction of CO2 to methanol. Specifically, we combine information from density functional theory with detailed micro-kinetic modeling to predict reactor-level performance. The role of various active sites on the Cu-Zn-Zr/Al2O3 catalyst for CO2 reduction will be analysed. Finally, a numerical study on optimising a thermally-integrated reactor for catalytic CO2 reduction will be presented. These case studies are chosen to exemplify the synergy we are trying to leverage in the collaboration between University of Sydney  and IIT Madras.

Bio: Dr. Niket Kaisare is currently Professor and Head of the department of Chemical Engineering at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras, Chennai, India. He served as a coordinator of NPTEL/Swayam (National Program for Technology Enhanced Learning), a MOOCs platform funded by Ministry of Education, India. Niket completed his PhD in Chemical Engineering at Georgia Tech in 2004. After a postdoctoral stint at the University of Delaware, he joined as an assistant professor in IIT Madras in summer 2007. Between 2011 and 2014, Niket spent three years in industrial R&D, first at General Motors and then at ABB Corporate Research in India. He rejoined as a faculty at IIT Madras in November 2014. His research interests are broadly in using experiments and multiscale modeling in combustion, catalysis and control for energy applications and in CO2 separation and conversion.