Chemical Engineering March 2022 - 5

Chementator
This heat battery is a decarbonized,
'drop-in' replacement for industrial boilers
A
s the cost of renewable energy decreases,
many organizations are
looking to electrify their operations
to reduce carbon emissions. One
promising area for decarbonization is industrial
heating, which accounts for a large
fraction of global emissions. However, heating
networks in plants can be very complex,
making modifications to existing configurations
extremely costly.
Now, a new " heat battery " developed by
Rondo Energy, Inc. (Oakland, Calif.; www.
rondo.energy) aims to provide affordable, decarbonized
process heat in a drop-in module
that can be easily integrated into an existing
boiler network, either to replace aging boilVariable
electricity input
do's technology does not depend on combustion
or phase change, and with its low-cost
solid heating media, there is no possibility of
gas or liquid being released. " The units are
safe and compact, and can tie into existing facilities
the same way that existing gas- or coalfired
boilers do today, " adds O'Donnell. Furthermore,
Rondo's system can achieve very
high temperatures (up to 1,000°C), whereas
energy-storage systems that employ liquid
salts may only reach 570°C, which limits their
use for industrial applications.
The company expects to announce its first
commercial installations later this year and
was recently awarded $22 million in Series A
funding. " We've made the transition from the
High temperature heat storage
Continuous, configurable
heat output
Hot air
Edited by:
Gerald Ondrey
2D POLYMER
Chemical engineers at
the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology (MIT;
Cambridge; www.mit.
edu) have synthesized
two-dimensional sheets
of
polyaramide.
The
Steam
Rondo Energy
ers or to complement those still in operation.
" We found a way to use well-proven materials
in a new combination to build a heat battery
that uses renewable electricity to deliver hightemperature
heat by circulating air through a
solid material to deliver hot air or high-pressure
steam at any condition, " explains John
O'Donnell, CEO of Rondo Energy. To meet the
safety requirements of industrial plants, RonFeed
water
laboratory to prototypes to first field installations.
These units are now industrial scale -
the standard unit delivers 20 MW of steam,
which is like a boiler that's burning 85 million
Btu/h, " says O'Donnell. Furthermore, because
the units are equipped with both conventional
and dynamic outer insulation layers,
heat losses are minimized, resulting in a 98%
heat-delivery efficiency.
Quantum-inspired computing technology
drastically accelerates materials design
S
emiconductor materials contain numerous
ingredients in various mixing
ratios, and high-performance materials
are obtained by optimizing the
formulation. However, more than 1,050 theoretical
combinations of ingredients and mixing
ratios need to be analyzed, so it would take
more than dozens of years to explore all possible
combinations of these ingredients and
their mixing ratios with conventional artificial
intelligence (AI) methods, according to Showa
Denko K.K. (Tokyo, Japan; www.sdk.co.jp).
To reduce the time required for the exploration,
the company used high-performance
computing technology, Digital Annealer, a domain-specific
computer architecture developed
by Fujitsu Ltd. (Kawasaki, Japan: www.
CHEMICAL ENGINEERING WWW.CHEMENGONLINE.COM
fujitsu.com) that is inspired by quantum technology
(but not directly using quantum effects).
Showa Denko developed an AI model
for predicting the properties of semiconductor
materials. To make the AI model computable
on Digital Annealer, Showa Denko expressed
the AI model as an Ising model, a statistical
mechanical method. By simulating the Ising
model on Digital Annealer, the company says
it has reduced the exploration time to dozens
of seconds, about 72,000 times faster than
the time required by conventional AI methods.
The optimal formulation designed with
the Ising model is expected to obtain semiconductor
materials with 30% higher performance
than the formulation designed with
conventional AI methods, the company says.
MARCH 2022
achievement, described
in a February issue of Nature,
is said to be the first
time a polymer has been
grown in 2D, creating
a material with unusual
properties: films of the
material have a 2D elastic
modulus of 12.7 GPa
(4-6 times greater than
that of bullet-proof glass)
and a 2D yield strength
of 488 MPa (twice that
of steel). Combined with
a density that is onesixth
that of steel, these
properties could make
the material find applications
as lightweight,
durable coatings for mobile
devices and cars, or
as building materials for
bridges and buildings.
The new material,
dubbed 2DPA-1, is made
by
the
homogenous
2D irreversible polycondensation
of
melamine
- a spontaneous selfassembly
process. The
synthesized material can
then be spin-coated into
thin films. These films are
not only strong, but also
impermeable to gases,
which would make them
useful as barrier coatings
for metal structures.
Further
experiments
are underway to learn
more about the formation
mechanism of 2DPA-1, as
well as changing the molecular
makeup to create
other types of materials.
Two patents have already
been filed on the
production process.
BIO-HMDA
A partnership between
Genomatica (San Diego,
Calif.; www.genomatica.
com) and Covestro AG
(Leverkusen, Germany;
(Continues on p. 6)
5
https://mit.edu https://mit.edu http://www.rondo.energy.com http://www.rondo.energy http://www.fujitsu.com http://www.sdk.co.jp http://www.genomatica.com http://WWW.CHEMENGONLINE.COM
Chemical Engineering March 2022

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Chemical Engineering March 2022
