Assoc. Prof. Silvio De Oliveira Junior
University of Sao Paulo
Mechanical Engineering
Sao Paulo, Brazil
Silvio de Oliveira Junior is an Associate Professor 3 at Polytechnic School of the University of São Paulo, Brazil. He has been developing research activities on heat pumps and refrigeration systems, solar energy, energy conservation in industrial processes, cogeneration systems and exergy and thermoeconomic analysis of thermal and chemical processes. He has supervised 3 Pos-Doc research programs, 13 Doctor Thesis (in Mechanical Engineering), 21 Master Dissertations (in Mechanical Engineering, Automotive Engineering and Energy), 9 MBA in Energy and Cogeneration and Distributed Generation, and 94 Undergraduate Projects in Mechanical Engineering. He is author of the book Exergy: production, cost and renewability (Springer, 2013), author/co-author of 250 publications and communications, senior member of the Brazilian Society of Mechanical Sciences and Engineering and has a Scholarship in Research Productivity of the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development. He is also member of the Editorial Board of Energy and the International Journal of Thermodynamics. In the past ten years he has been involved with research projects related to energy use in biodiesel production plants, sugar and alcohol utility and production plants, offshore and onshore petroleum platforms, petroleum refinery plants, co/trigeneration and combined cycle plants, airplane energy systems modeling, modeling and simulation of twin-screw multiphase pumping systems, ammonia production plants, and exergy behaviour of human body.
Biomass and wastes upgrading: An exergy approach to the decarbonisation of electricity generation, fuels and chemicals production routes
Biomass and wastes upgrading are environmentally friendly alternatives to replace fossil fuels and to reduce the environmental impact of energy conversion processes. As these energy resources have to be converted in an efficient and sustainable way into a diversity of forms of useful energy (electricity, fuels and chemicals), the exergy analysis proved to be a powerful tool to evaluate the quality of those energy conversion processes. This comprehensive approach can deal not only with the thermodynamics analysis, but also includes economic and environmental aspects and impacts of energy conversion processes, allowing to identify sustainable ways of energy resources utilization.
This lecture will describe and discuss six applications regarding the exergy and environmental assessment of energy conversion processes in the production of fuels, chemicals and electricity generation. These studies aim to highlight the contributions that the exergy method offers to reduce wastes and environmental impact on the production routes that employ biomass and wastes as energy resources. Performance parameters will be presented and applied to these processes in order to quantify and compare the efficiency, renewability, renewable and non-renewable unit exergy cost and the cumulative CO2 emissions of the value added products of these processes.
The six studies and applications are the following:
- Renewable and non-renewable exergy costs and CO2 emissions in the production of fuels for Brazilian transportation sector.
- Bioethanol production routes (conventional, biochemical and thermochemical).
- Biomass based ammonia production routes.
- Black liquor upgraded gasification in an integrated Kraft pulp and ammonia production plant.
- Biogas fuelled solid oxide fuel cell with internal reforming and hydrogen co-production.
- Renewable and non-renewable exergy cost and specific CO2 emission of electricity generation: Comparison of the Brazilian and the Netherlands cases.