Multiscale Energy Systems Design

Multiscale energy systems

Modern energy systems integrate components across vastly different scales, from nanoscale materials to industrial process equipment, to utility-scale power plants. While traditional approaches often focus on individual scales in isolation, optimizing these integrated systems demands a holistic multiscale approach—one that considers their deeply interconnected nature across all scales, an aspect currently underexplored in scientific literature.

Our research bridges this critical gap between process engineering and materials science through systematic co-optimization. The cornerstone of our approach is the development and integration of materials surrogate models into comprehensive process simulation frameworks, enabling simultaneous multi-scale optimization of both material properties and process conditions.

Our current focus centers on pressure swing adsorption (PSA) systems and advanced microporous materials, particularly metal-organic frameworks (MOFs). These systems represent a promising pathway toward energy-efficient gas separation—a crucial technology for both carbon capture and sequestration and clean hydrogen production through blue hydrogen pathways.

While our immediate application targets PSA systems, we’re developing our methodological framework to be adaptable and extensible to other process-materials co-optimization challenges, ensuring broader impact across diverse energy applications, from renewable integration to industrial decarbonization.

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