FMRG: Cyber: Manufacturing USA: Exploiting Spatio-Temporal Interdependency Between Electrochemical Manufacturing and Power Grid to Optimize Flexibility and Sustainability

The chemical manufacturing sector and the power grid are becoming increasingly coupled. This is driven by their shared interest in decarbonizing operations: the chemical sector is aiming to decarbonize via electrification of key technologies, while the grid is aiming to decarbonize via adoption of renewable (wind/solar) power. As such, mitigating the inherent intermittency of renewable power is a grand challenge that needs to be overcome to achieve decarbonization of both sectors.

This will require the design of new and flexible technologies that can shift power demands from the seconds to seasons timescale and from the local to the national level. The chemical sector is uniquely positioned to help provide these unprecedented levels of flexibility. This can be achieved via modular electrochemical (EC) technologies that use highly intermittent power to produce chemicals in a distributed manner and via the efficient production of energy carriers (e.g., hydrogen, ammonia, formic acid) that can be used to store, transport, and re-generate power.

To realize this vision, a paradigm shift under which EC technologies are co-designed with electricity markets is needed; specifically, EC technologies need to be designed as flexibility providers that actively participate in electricity markets and such markets need to properly remunerate flexibility services. More broadly, EC technologies are vital sector-coupling assets that can provide flexibility to enable risk mitigation (e.g., extreme weather, cyber-attacks) and can play a key role in ensuring that the power grid and chemical supply chains operate in a reliable, sustainable, and economic manner.

Accordingly, This Future CyberManufacturing research grant will boost American chemical manufacturing and advance the prosperity and welfare of the United States. The project will also lead to new design principles, simulation models, data, and technologies that enhance the training of the next-generation workforce of chemical engineers, electrical engineers, and chemists to leverage multiscale thinking to develop technologies and solutions.

The project will also lead to new business practices that foster coordination between chemical and power sectors with the goal of helping accelerate the adoption of new technologies and decarbonization efforts.

The goal of this Future Manufacturing project is to conduct fundamental computational and experimental research to design new and flexible electrochemical (EC) technologies that best integrate with the power grid and with chemical supply chains, to identify key aspects that limit flexibility of these technologies, and to determine how to best exploit their flexibility to achieve economic and sustainability goals at a societal scale. Specifically, an interdisciplinary team will: (i) develop infrastructure-level modeling techniques that capture the multiscale coupling between the chemical and power sectors that capture different types of EC technologies and help identify amounts and types of flexibility needed; (ii) develop device-level models for EC technologies that capture the interplay between flexibility and design (e.g., cell capacity, ramping capacity, efficiency, durability); (iii) develop density functional theory models that help identify electrode materials to meet design specifications; and (iv) develop experimental procedures to evaluate different reaction chemistries, materials, and EC configurations (e.g., coupled, decoupled, tandem, cascade), and to collect key data that informs modeling and economic/environmental assessments.

These capabilities will be combined via convergent studies that will answer questions of societal and industrial relevance. The convergent research approach will lead to new design principles, simulation models, data, and technologies that will serve as the backbone of a workforce development plan that will train a new generation of chemical engineers, electrical engineers, and chemists that leverage multiscale thinking to develop technologies and solutions.

The project will lead to new business practices that foster coordination between the chemical and power sectors with the goal of helping accelerate the adoption of EC technologies and decarbonization efforts. This Future Manufacturing award was supported by the Divisions of Civil, Mechanical and Manufacturing Innovation (CMMI), Chemical, Bioengineering, Environmental and Transport Systems (CBET), Engineering Education and Centers (EEC), Chemistry (CHE), and the Division of Mathematical Sciences (DMS).

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.