AIChE Environmental Symposium 2017 | AIChE

AIChE Environmental Symposium 2017

Friday, October 27, 2017,
11:00am to 4:00pm
CDT
In-Person / Local
411 W Arapaho Rd
Richardson, TX 75080
United States

Click here to download the flyer for the event

The AIChE Dallas Section is hosting its inaugural Environmental Engineering Symposium. Come learn about a wide variety of real-world applications of environmental engineering and how our profession is ensuring a safe and clean world. You will find payment information and the speakers and abstracts below.

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Speaker: John Kiser

Abstract

"Gasification - Retrofitting a Mature Process to a New Application"

Gasification... the conversion of carbonaceous materials into CO, CO2 and H2 through exposure to high temperature in an oxygen starved environment... is a process that was discovered in the 1800s. Since that time, it has been studied and applied in countless ways and today, there are an estimated 950 large scale gasification installations around the world containing about 2,600 gasification systems, each supplying an average of 435 MW of energy. As electricity, each could provide enough to power a mid-sized US city like Pittsburgh or St. Louis. Coal is the primary feedstock for about 80% of future gasification projects; these installations however are not making electricity, but methanol and ammonia, to supply a growing petrochemical industry in China and India.

SDL Citadel, LLC was formed to explore the idea of applying gasification technology to post- industrial and post-consumer paper and plastic to recover usable electricity and heat. Recent successes have produced over 320 kW of electricity from 5 tpd of waste made of a 50/50 mix of paper and plastic. While it’s an exciting start, gasification of paper and plastics (particularly) creates significant chemical, mechanical, thermodynamic and safety challenges requiring a marriage of historical best practices, unconventional thinking, a lot of patience and a little luck.

This presentation will discuss SDL’s work, highlighting some of the technical, environmental, functional, safety, and economic challenges it faces as it works to address the needs of potential industries, governments and markets seeking a higher purpose for their post-industrial and post- consumer waste. 

Bio

John B. Kiser, President and CEO, SDL Citadel, LLC. SDL Citadel is an R&D company that is developing a system designed to unlock the latent energy in post-industrial and post-consumer solid waste and convert it into useful products – primarily electricity and heat. He was first involved with SDL in 2011 as an active investor and consultant, then in September, 2015, he was named as its senior leader.

Previously, Mr. Kiser worked at the Lyle School of Engineering at SMU from 2006 – 2015. He started as its Director of Strategic Planning, later becoming an Associate Dean, and finally as the Executive Director of the Hart Center for Engineering Leadership where he designed and delivered leadership and professional development programs to complement students’ technical education. Before SMU, John had a wide variety of engineering, marketing and management roles with oil and gas companies including Lyco Energy Corporation (Dallas), Mobil Oil Corporation (Baton Rouge, Dallas, Pittsburgh), and Exxon Company USA (Midland). His exposure to the oil industry began while in high school giving him over twenty-five years of work experience in the industry.

He attended the Colorado School of Mines and later, Texas A&M University where in 1984 he received a Bachelor of Science degree in Petroleum Engineering. In 1997 he received his Master of Business Administration degree from SMU.

Mr. Kiser currently serves on the Advisory Board of the Carr P. Collins Social Service Center for the Salvation Army, where he was its chairman from 2011-2015. He also served on the Town North YMCA Board of Management from 1997- 2007, having served for two years as its chair and having successfully led three annual campaigns and one capital campaign.

John and his wife, Susan, have lived in Dallas since 1996. They have twin sons Luke and Logan who are both senior engineering students at Texas A&M and graduating in December, 2017. 

Speaker: Dr. Jincheng Du

Abstract

"Corrosion of glasses for nuclear waste disposal"

Radioactive nuclear wastes are generated from medicine, industrial processes, defense, and nuclear power production. Safe immobilization of these wastes are critical to solve the energy and environmental challenges of our era. Inorganic borosilicate glasses are the established material of choice to immobilize medium and high level nuclear wastes in US and several other countries. These glasses are stored in geological storage sites for hundreds to thousands of years. Understanding the processes how these glasses corrode in aqueous environments and the release of ions to the surrounding solutions consists an important part of the nuclear waste design and research. I will present researches from our group on atomistic and first principles computers simulations to understand the structure of complex multicomponent nuclear waste glasses and the glass/water interfaces to understand the fundamentalprocesses governing the corrosion of glass materials. The focus will be on the understanding of the nano- porous silica gel layer structures and their interfaces with water formed during glass dissolution by using Reactive Force Field based molecular dynamics simulations. These gel layer are critical to the residual dissolution rate that make these glasses durable for geological time scales. Our results show that atomistic and first principles simulations can provide mechanistic understanding of glass corrosion and guidance to the design glasses for nuclear waste disposal, and other applications such as biomedicine.
 

Bio

Dr. Jincheng Du is a Professor and Associate Department Chair in the

Department of Material Science and Engineering at University of North Texas, Denton, Texas. He received his Ph.D. in Ceramics from Alfred University and postdoctoral training at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and University of Virginia. His current research focuses on applying classical and first principles computer simulations of glasses, ceramic and nanostructured materials, defects and interfaces in materials, with an aim to understand the structural origin of properties for materials with biomedical, environmental, energy and microelectronic applications. Dr. Du has over 100 peer reviewed journal publications and given over 50 invited talks and seminars in international conferences and at institutions around world. He is the recipient of the Early Career Award for Research and Creativity in 2012 and Faculty Research Award in 2016 at University of North Texas. Dr. Du serves as the technical committee Chair of TC27 Atomistic simulations of glass of International Commission on Glass (ICG).
 

Speaker: Dr. Debalina Sengupta

Abstract

"Sustainability in the Context of Process Engineering"

Process design for sustainability using various available techniques is still limited to computer-aided design featuring process optimization of energy and material flow. In some cases, minimizing greenhouse gas emission and water conservation has been incorporated into design. Sustainable process demands more, such as minimizing the impacts from other harmful emissions, discharges, waste creation, economic, and societal impacts. This talk will be on demonstrating the integration of sustainability principles for process engineering.

Bio

Dr. Sengupta is the Associate Director of the Gas and Fuels Research Center for Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station (TEES). Her roles include research collaboration development for the Center through mega project funds, industry partnerships, and other channels. She started her research career working on the natural gas based agricultural chemical production complex in the Lower Mississippi River Corridor. Her research was focused on process integration for developing chemicals from biomass within an existing industrial complex and quantification of sustainability using an optimization based approach. Following this, her first book titled “Chemicals from biomass: integrating bioprocesses into chemical production complexes for sustainable development” was published by CRC Press in the Green Chemistry and Chemical Engineering Series in 2012. After her PhD from Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, she went to work as a post doctoral fellow at the National Risk Management Research Laboratory of the United States Environmental Protection Agency in Cincinnati, OH. There, she worked on multiple research initiatives on sustainability and systems analysis through the Sustainable Technology Division. Specific projects included the Sustainable Supply Chain Design for Biofuels, a Co-operative Research and Development Agreement with Procter & Gamble on Sustainable Supply Chain Design of Consumer Products, and the use of sustainability metrics for decision making. She has several peer reviewed journal articles dealing with a wide range of topics like process integration, sustainability metrics, life cycle assessment etc. Her latest book has been published in early 2017 titled “Measuring Progress towards Sustainability”, a Springer publication. Dr. Sengupta has held several leadership roles at AIChE. She was a Director for 2011-2015, Programming Chair for 2014-2016 and currently the Second Vice Chair for the Environmental Division. She is also the Director for the Fuels and Petrochemicals Division for the 2016-2019 term.

 

Speaker: Dr. Brian Burdorf

Abstract

"Air Quality Environmental Permitting & Industrial Market
Changes: Shale Production, Terminals, Refining, Chemicals"
 
Brian will discuss recent changes in the oil and gas sector which have impacted
and will continue to impact other industrial sectors including the liquid terminal,
refining, and chemical sectors. Based on his expertise providing air quality
environmental consulting assistance for all segments of the industrial community,
Brian will highlight how these changes as well as regulatory agency changes and
public interest has influenced key air quality environmental permitting and
compliance activities for industrial facilities in the US.
 
Bio
 
Brian Burdorf is a Director in Trinity Consultants’ Gulf Coast Operation with 25 years of air quality environmental experience supporting industrialoperations located throughout the US. His experience includes the preparation, supervision, and management of several hundred projects involving air quality permitting, compliance, facility siting, due diligence, compliance audits, expert testimony, dispersion modeling, and emission inventories. Mr. Burdorf has provided air permitting strategy support, control technology evaluations, and emission offset feasibility analyses including construction and operating permit application preparations for greenfield and existing site expansion projects in attainment and nonattainment counties. He has supported clients in the petroleum refining, liquid terminals, chemical manufacturing, oil and gas exploration, production, processing and transmission, electric power generation, cogeneration, steel manufacturing, cement manufacturing, mining, and tire manufacturing industries. He recently obtained air quality environmental approval from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) for a greenfield petroleum refinery proposed for construction in West Texas. Mr. Burdorf is the instructor for Trinity’s one-day course titled Clean Air Act Workshop for the Liquid Terminal Industry. He has also presented on the topic of Managing Air Permitting Challenges in Facility Expansions at the 2015 and 2017 International Liquid Terminals Association (ILTA) Operating Conference and Trade Show in Houston.

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