Million Pound Green Grant

Yong Yan, Professor of Electronic Instrumentation, and his colleagues Peter Lee and Gang Lu at the Department of Electronics have been awarded £411,147 by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) under the programme of Renewable Energy Technologies, for a project entitled: “CO2 Reductions from Biomass/Coal Fired Power Plant through Integrated Measurement and Computational Modelling”.
This is part of an international collaborative project with partners from the Universities of Nottingham and Leeds and collaborators from Zhejiang, Xian Jiaotong and Tianjin Universities in P. R. China. The overall support from the EPSRC for the consortium is nearly £900,000. Additionally, power generation organizations, including E.ON, RWE npower, Alstom Power and China Datang Corporation, have agreed to provide a total in-kind support of more than £120,000 for the research.
This project aims to optimise the operation of biomass/coal fired power plant through integrated measurement and computational modelling. As the lead partner in the consortium, the Kent team will be responsible for the instrumentation and monitoring aspects of the project. These include on-line measurement of biomass/coal/air three-phase flow, on-line particle sizing, and continuous monitoring of burner conditions and flame stability under biomass/coal co-firing conditions.
Coal is the main source of energy in many countries, so co-firing with biomass will help reduce global emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases. This collaborative project provides a platform for the research groups from both UK and China to tackle the common co-firing challenges together, which will ultimately lead to significantly reduced emissions and efficient use of biomass from a diverse range of sources in a wide variety of forms on a much greater scale.