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The project addresses the technical breakthrough in energy management urgently needed in the process industries. An integrated and multidisciplinary research will be made to achieve maximum potential for heat recovery and to allow a step change improvement in heat recovery through the application of process intensification method and associated heat transfer equipment. New design concepts and in-depth knowledge will be gained from various studies proposed in this project, especially investigation of fouling kinetics, analysis of intensified heat transfer, exploitation of enhanced heat transfer techniques, gaining of strategic guidance for the implementation of intensified heat exchanger networks, and development of automated design methodology for intensified heat recovery systems. The successful completion of the project will radically improve energy and capital efficiency for process industries, and significantly accelerate the implementation of intensified heat transfer design in industrial practice.

The provision of cold is a vital foundation of modern society to underpins many aspects of modern life, consumes up to 14% of the UK's electricity, and is also responsible for around 10% of UK's greenhouse gas emissions, including both CO2 associated with their power consumption and leakage of refrigerants with high Global Warming Potential (GWP). In order to achieve net-zero emission target in 2050 in the UK, we must significantly decarbonise the cooling sector. The decarbonisation of the cooling section requires to tackle two key challenges. Firstly, the leakage of traditional, refrigerants with high GWP is a key issue of the greenhouse gas emission of the cooling sector. It is, therefore, necessary to substitute them with low GWP natural refrigerant such as CO2. Secondly, the high-power consumption of the cooling sector also results in greenhouse gas emission if non-renewable power is consumed. Hence, cost-effective cold storage capacity will need to be deployed to maximise the use of intermittent renewable energy and cheap off-peak electricity. The recent study concluded that the addition of cold storage can potentially provide a 43% decrease in peak period consumption. In response to the challenges identified above, this project aims to develop a novel integrated system for cold energy generation and storage using CO2 hydrate as both refrigerant and storage material, contributing to the decarbonisation of the cooling sector in the UK and more widely the global. The multidisciplinary consortium, consisting of six leading researchers from the Universities of Birmingham, Glasgow and Heriot-Watt, processes a wide range of well-balanced expertise including chemical engineering, thermodynamics, heat transfer, CFD, and economics to address several key scientific and technical challenges, and is further supported by several leading industrial partners to maximise knowledge exchange and impact delivery.

Boiling phenomena are central to heating and cooling duties in many industries, such as cooling and refrigeration, power generation, and chemical manufacture. Limitations to boiling heat transfer arise through surface dry-out at high heat flux, leading to localised hot-spots on heat transfer surfaces and larger equipment requirements. Whilst this is a significant problem for many industries, it becomes even more of an issue when dealing with small-scale systems, such as those used for cooling of microelectronics, where failure to remove heat effectively leads to localised overheating and potential damage of components. Spatially non-uniform and unsteady dissipative heat generation in such systems is detrimental to their performance and longevity. The effective heat exchanger area is of order sq. cm, with heat fluxes of order MW/sqm. This requires a transformative, step-change, beyond the current state-of-the-art for cooling heat fluxes between 2-15 MW/sqm at local "hot spots" to prevent burn out. A number of attempts have already been made to extend the upper boundary for the heat flux through alteration of surface characteristics with the aim of improved nucleation of vapour bubbles, bubble detachment, and subsequent rewetting of the surface by liquid. Despite the progress made, previous work on surfaces for pool- (and potentially flow-) boiling does not involve a rational approach for developing optimal surface topography. For instance, nucleate boiling heat transfer (NBHT) decreases with increasing wettability, and the designer must consider the nucleation site density, associated bubble departure diameter, and frequency related to the surface structure and fluid phase behaviour. For high surface wettability, the smaller-scale surface structure characteristics (e.g. cavities) can act as nucleation sites; for low wettability, the cavity dimensions, rather than its topology, will dominate. Therefore, characterising surfaces in terms of roughness values is insufficient to account for the changes in the boiling curve: the fluid-surface coupling must be studied in detail for the enhancement of NBHT and the critical heat flux. EMBOSS brings together a multi-disciplinary team of researchers from Brunel, Edinburgh, and Imperial, and six industrial partners and a collaborator (Aavid Thermacore, TMD ltd, Oxford Nanosystems, Intrinsiq Materials, Alfa Laval, CALGAVIN, and OxfordLasers) with expertise in cutting-edge micro-fabrication, experimental techniques, and molecular-, meso- and continuum-scale modelling and simulation. The EMBOSS framework will inform the rational design, fabrication, and optimisation of operational prototypes of a pool-boiling thermal management system. Design optimality will be measured in terms of materials and energy savings, heat-exchange equipment efficiency and footprint, reduction of emissions, and process sustainability. The collaboration with our partners will ensure alignment with the industrial needs, and will accelerate technology transfer to industry. These partners will provide guidance and advice through the project progress meetings, which some of them will also host. In addition, Alfa Laval will provide brazed heat exchangers as condensers for the experimental work, Intrinsiq will provide copper ink for coating surfaces and Oxford nanoSystems will provide nano-structured surface coatings. The project will integrate the challenges identified by EPSRC Prosperity Outcomes and the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund in Energy (Resilient Nation), manufacturing and digital technologies (Resilient Nation, Productive Nation), as areas to drive economic growth.

BONSAI is an ambitious 3-year research project aimed at investigating the fundamental heat and mass transfer features of boiling flows in miniaturised channels. It combines cutting-edge experiments based on space/time-resolved diagnostics, with high-fidelity interface-resolving numerical simulations, to ultimately provide validated thermal-design tools for high-performance compact evaporators. The proposed project assembles multidisciplinary expertise of investigators at Imperial College London, Brunel University London, and the University of Nottingham, with support from 3 world-leading research institutes: Alan Turing Institute, CERN (Switzerland) and VIR2AL; and 11 industry partners: Aavid Boyd Thermacore, Alfa Laval, CALGAVIN, HEXAG&PIN, HiETA, Hubbard/Daikin, IBM, Oxford nanoSystems, Ricardo, TMD and TTP. The recent trend towards device miniaturisation driven by the microelectronics industry has placed an increasing demand on removing higher thermal loads, of order of MW/m2, from areas of order cm2. In some applications (e.g. refrigeration) new 'green' refrigerants are needed, but in small volumes due to flammability or cost, while in others (e.g. batteries for EV and other applications) non-uniform or unsteady heat dissipation is highly detrimental to performance and lifetime. Flow boiling in multi-microchannel evaporators promises to meet such challenging requirements with low fluid volumes, also allowing better temperature uniformity and smaller pumping power, in systems that go well beyond the current state-of-the-art. Due to significant industrial (heat exchange) and environmental (efficient energy use) interest, the understanding of boiling heat transfer has improved in recent years, with focus on flow pattern transitions and characteristics, pressure drop, and heat transfer performance. However, our current understanding is simply insufficient to facilitate the wider use of these micro-heat-exchangers in industry, which remains unexploited. BONSAI has been tailored specifically to address the fundamental phenomena underlying boiling in miniaturised devices and their relevance to industrial design. The challenges to be addressed include the impact of channel shape and surface characteristics on flow instabilities, heat transfer and pressure drop, and the relationship between the time-dependent evolution of the liquid-vapour interface, thin liquid-film dynamics, flow field, appearance of dry vapour patches, hot spots, and local heat transfer characteristics. The extensive experimental/numerical database generated will be exploited via theoretical and novel machine-learning methods to develop physics-based design tools for predicting the effects of industrially-relevant thermohydraulic parameters on system performance. The collaboration with our partners will ensure alignment with industrial needs and accelerate technology transfer to industry. In addition, HiETA will provide Metal Additive Manufacturing heat sinks that will be assessed against embossing technologies as ways of mass-producing microchannel heat exchangers, Oxford nanoSystems will provide nano-structured surface coatings, and IBM will support visits to their Research Labs focussed on efficient parallelisation of the numerical solver and scale-out studies. The proposed research will not only enable a wider adoption of two-phase thermal solutions and hence the meeting of current and future needs across industrial sectors, but also will lead to more efficient thermal management of data-centres with associated reduction in energy consumption and carbon footprint, and the recovery and reuse of waste heat that is currently being rejected. This will constitute an important step towards meeting the UK's emission targets by 2050. Additionally, BONSAI will integrate with EPSRC Prosperity Outcomes of Delivery Plan 2016-20 and enable technological advances in relation to the Manufacturing the Future theme, contributing to a Productive and Resilient Nation.