Survey and evaluate Uncertainty Quantification Methodologies

Abstract

The Carbon Capture Simulation Initiative (CCSI) is a partnership among national laboratories, industry and academic institutions that will develop and deploy state-of-the-art computational modeling and simulation tools to accelerate the commercialization of carbon capture technologies from discovery to development, demonstration, and ultimately the widespread deployment to hundreds of power plants. The CCSI Toolset will provide end users in industry with a comprehensive, integrated suite of scientifically validated models with uncertainty quantification, optimization, risk analysis and decision making capabilities. The CCSI Toolset will incorporate commercial and open-source software currently in use by industry and will also develop new software tools as necessary to fill technology gaps identified during execution of the project. The CCSI Toolset will (1) enable promising concepts to be more quickly identified through rapid computational screening of devices and processes; (2) reduce the time to design and troubleshoot new devices and processes; (3) quantify the technical risk in taking technology from laboratory-scale to commercial-scale; and (4) stabilize deployment costs more quickly by replacing some of the physical operational tests with virtual power plant simulations. The goal of CCSI is to deliver a toolset that can simulate the scale-up of a broad set of new carbon capture technologies from laboratory scale to full commercial scale. To provide a framework around which the toolset can be developed and demonstrated, we will focus on three Industrial Challenge Problems (ICPs) related to carbon capture technologies relevant to U.S. pulverized coal (PC) power plants. Post combustion capture by solid sorbents is the technology focus of the initial ICP (referred to as ICP A). The goal of the uncertainty quantification (UQ) task (Task 6) is to provide a set of capabilities to the user community for the quantification of uncertainties associated with the carbon capture processes. As such, we will develop, as needed and beyond existing capabilities, a suite of robust and efficient computational tools for UQ to be integrated into a CCSI UQ software framework.