The Carbon Capture Simulation Initiative (CCSI) released its first set of computational tools and models on October 10, 2012 when the CCSI Technical Team met with representatives from the 19 companies currently participating on the CCSI Industry Advisory Board (IAB). This pre-release, a year ahead of the originally planned first release, was the result of intense industry interest in getting early access to the tools and the phenomenal progress of the CCSI Technical Team.
These initial components of the CCSI Toolset provide new models and computational capabilities that will accelerate the commercial development of carbon capture technologies and a broad range of technology development in general (power, refining, chemicals production, gas production, etc.). The release consists of new tools for process synthesis and optimization to help identify promising concepts more quickly, new physics-based models of potential capture equipment and processes that will reduce the time to design and troubleshoot new systems, a framework to quantify the uncertainty of model predictions, and various enabling tools that provide new capabilities such as creating reduced order models (ROMs) from reacting multiphase flow simulations and running thousands of concurrent process simulations concurrently for optimization and uncertainty quantification (UQ).
Following IAB workshop, Dr. John Shinn, the CCSI IAB Coordinator, reported that, "IAB members found the program progress impressive, well beyond what they might have expected at this point in the program, and that the program continues to be very well coordinated...the CCSI tool set pre-release of 21 technology deployment support tools, which appeared well ahead of original schedule, was very well received by the member companies with multiple members making immediate plans for adoption of the tools. The toolset is seen as being highly applicable for the CCSI core objectives (accelerating carbon capture deployment) as well as a broad range of other industry technology development and deployment applications."
The CCSI Technical Team began development of these tools and models less than 2 years ago in February of 2011 following an DOE-HQ-led scientific peer review.
The next regularly scheduled IAB Program Review Meeting is set for April 23-24, 2013 in Reston, Virginia.