WKU Awarded $2 Million For
Combustion Technology Project
September 26, 2003
Bowling Green, Ky. - Western Kentucky University has received a $2 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy for a project to help reduce pollution from coal-fired power plants.
The grant was awarded to Drs. Wei-Ping Pan, Kunlei Liu and John T. Riley for their project "Establishment of an Environmental Control Technology Laboratory with a Circulating Fluidized Bed Combustion System."
The award is the largest competitive grant ever received in the Ogden College of Science and Engineering.
WKU has purchased and will renovate 10,000 square feet of laboratory space to house the Environmental Control Technology Laboratory (ECTL), which will involve the expansion and renaming of the Combustion Laboratory. Design and construction planning of the ECTL and the circulating fluidized bed system (CFBC) system is under way.
Renovation of the laboratory at Western's Center for Research and Development is expected by the summer of 2004 with completion of the CFBC system by the summer of 2005.
"This will greatly enhance our capabilities at the combustion laboratory," Dr. Pan said. The laboratory, established in 1992, has been involved with numerous projects to study emissions of nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxides and mercury during combustion.
The grant award was made through the Combustion Technology University Alliance, a program at the National Energy Technology Laboratory in Pittsburgh that includes about 20 universities and 15 companies.
The CTUA, an applied research program, was started to help coal-fired power plants deal with current problems of operation and help develop strategies to meet environmental requirements. Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) was instrumental in getting Congress to appropriate the funds to get the CTUA started.
The primary objective of the WKU project is to establish an Environmental Control Technology Laboratory (ECTL) using a multifunctional circulating fluidized bed combustion (CFBC) system. The system can be easily configured to make combustion runs with various fuels under varying conditions to analyze and monitor air pollutant emissions, as requested by the lab's industrial partners.
The ECTL will help develop technologies that can be used to control emissions under multi-pollutant control legislation that is under consideration by Congress. The successful development of these technologies will provide scientific data for atmospheric pollutants resulting from combustion systems and the methodologies required to reduce the emission of these pollutants across the United States.
This grant award is a result of cooperative efforts between the Department of Chemistry and the Architectural and Manufacturing Sciences Institute through the Materials Characterization Center, centers within the Applied Research and Technology Program of Distinction.
Chemistry students will help run the combustion system and perform chemical analysis on the fuels and combustion residues. Students from Architecture and Manufacturing Sciences will help design the CFBC system and facility to house it.
For more information, contact Dr. Wei-Ping Pan at (270) 780-2532 or Dr. John Riley at (270) 780-2568. More WKU news is available on the World Wide Web at www.wku.edu. If you’d like to receive WKU news via E-mail, send a message to WKUNews@wku.edu.
