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GTI Energy has been developing a novel process technology for hydrogen production from natural gas with inherent carbon capture. The GTI process, based on sorbent enhanced reforming (SER), has the advantage that it captures CO2 inherently in the process via a pre-combustion technique instead of secondary capture from a flue gas stream. This approach is fundamentally different from conventional technologies such as steam methane reforming (SMR) and autothermal reforming (ATR) which require additional process steps to avoid CO2 emissions. The inherent carbon capture capability results in step-out economics of the GTI process. The GTI process is based on GTI’s Hydrogen Generator (CHG) technology which converts natural gas and steam into H2 and CO2 in separate streams. The inherent carbon capture in the GTI process leads to its higher carbon capture potential, its substantially lower capital cost (by 40-60%) and substantially smaller footprint compared to the conventional approaches, resulting in overall lower levelized cost of hydrogen (by 10-30%). In its optimized configuration, carbon capture rates over 97.5%, with 10% lower levelized cost of hydrogen (LCOH) and ~50% reduction in CAPEX compared to conventional SMR with CO2 capture are achievable. By relaxing the carbon capture rate to 96%, a LCOH ~20% lower than the SMR case can be achieved. LCOH and CAPEX advantages of the process compared to Autothermal Reforming (ATR) are even more pronounced. Development of the process technology is currently supported by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and by the U.K. Department for Business, Energy, and Industrial Strategy (BEIS). DOE has been supporting the development and operation of a 0.071 MWth pilot plant at GTI’s main test facility near Chicago, USA, to demonstrate the process chemistry and fluidized bed operation. Under BEIS funding, a team comprised of Cranfield University, GTI Energy, and Doosan Babcock has been developing a 1 MWth pilot plant at a dedicated new test site at Cranfield University in the UK (“HyPER Project”).

SUMMARYNuclear size plays pivotal roles in gene expression, embryo development, and disease. A central hypothesis in organisms ranging from yeast to vertebrates is that nuclear size scales to cell size. This implies that nuclei may reach steady state sizes set by limiting cytoplasmic pools of size-regulating components. By monitoring nuclear dynamics in early sea urchin embryos, we found that nuclei undergo substantial growth in each interphase, reaching a maximal size prior to mitosis that declined steadily over the course of development. Manipulations of cytoplasmic volume through multiple chemical and physical means ruled out cell size as a major determinant of nuclear size and growth. Rather, our data suggest that the perinuclear endoplasmic reticulum, accumulated through dynein activity, serves as a limiting membrane pool that sets nuclear surface growth rate. Partitioning of this local pool at each cell division modulates nuclear growth kinetics and dictates size scaling throughout early development.

The combustion of coal and biomass fuels in power plants generates deposits on the surfaces of superheater / reheater tubes that can lead onto fireside corrosion. This type of materials degradation can limit the lives of such tubes in the long term, and better methods are needed to produce predictive models for such damage. This paper reports on four different approaches that are being investigated to tackle the challenge of modelling fireside corrosion damage on superheaters / reheaters: (a) CFD models to predict deposition onto tube surfaces; (b) generation of a database of available fireside corrosion data; (c) development of mechanistic and statistically based models of fireside corrosion from laboratory exposures and dimensional metrology; (d) statistical analysis of plant derived fireside corrosion datasets using multi-variable statistical techniques, such as Partial Least Squares Regression (PLSR). An improved understanding of the factors that influence fireside corrosion is resulting from the use of a combination of these different approaches to develop a suite of models for fireside corrosion damage.