Department of Energy Selects Reaction Design to Advance Its Clean Coal Initiative

SAN DIEGO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Reaction Design®, the clean technology chemistry leader, today announced that it has been granted one of seven awards from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) for a project intended to support the full-scale implementation and operation of highly efficient coal-based power generation technologies with near-zero emissions. Reaction Design will develop gasification and reaction kinetics simulation software to help solve critical engineering and operating problems that arise throughout the lifecycle of a power plant.

Project funding comes from the National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL), within the DOE’s Office of Fossil Energy, with a mission to develop next-generation power plants. Future power generation facilities are expected to be very complex and require a high level of system integration for efficient operation. To manage complexity and achieve performance goals, advances in simulation, instrumentation, sensors and process controls are vital to the success of NETL’s mission. As part of this effort, Reaction Design will conduct research and develop simulation capabilities aimed at enhancing the performance of next-generation fossil energy power systems.

According to Bernie Rosenthal, CEO of Reaction Design, “Coal combustion is widely used by the electric power industry, so it is critical for us to investigate how to optimize the gasification process to allow more environmentally responsible use of fossil-based fuels. This project builds our proven successes in using high-fidelity chemical-kinetics modeling to analyze complex systems, such as combustion in engines used for transportation and gas turbine-based power generation systems.”

Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle (IGCC) with carbon capture is the most environmentally friendly method of electrical generation from coal; however, improvements within power plant economics are required to make this technology more acceptable to the market. The focus of this project is to develop a simulation methodology that can enable cost-effective exploration of options that improve the gasification processes at the core of IGCC technology.

Reaction Design will develop an advanced form of reduced-order models that represent key unit operations in flow-sheet simulations. The company plans to extend its powerful ENERGICO® product, which uses advanced technology to automatically extract equivalent reactor networks (ERNs) from a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation. A key component of the project will be to encapsulate the high-fidelity ERNs as CAPE OPEN–compliant objects that can be used in general flow-sheet simulation software.

About Reaction Design

Reaction Design, a San Diego-based software supplier, enables transportation manufacturers and energy companies to rapidly achieve their Clean Technology goals by automating the analysis of chemical processes via computer simulation and modeling solutions. Reaction Design is the exclusive developer and distributor of CHEMKIN, the de facto standard for modeling gas-phase and surface chemistry that provides engineers ultra-fast access to reliable answers that save time and money in the Development process. Reaction Design’s world-class engineers, chemists and programmers have expertise that spans multi-scale engineering from the molecule to the production plant. Reaction Design serves more than 350 customers in the commercial, government and academic markets.

Reaction Design can be found online at www.reactiondesign.com.

CHEMKIN®, CHEMKIN-PRO® and Reaction Design® are registered trademarks of Reaction Design. ENERGICO, CHEMKIN-CFD and Model Fuels Consortium are trademarks of Reaction Design. All other trademarks are the property of their respective holders.