NETL is sharing its computer-aided design expertise this week at one of the world’s premier international conferences — 2019 Foundations of Computer-Aided Process Design (FOCAPD), an event devoted to promoting stronger industrial-academic collaboration in process and product design.

NETL has a long history of developing innovative computer-aided design capabilities. NETL received an R&D 100 Award for its Advanced Process Engineering Co-Simulator (APECS) and the Carbon Capture Simulation Initiative’s (CCSI) Toolset. Most recently, NETL’s Institute for the Design of Advanced Energy Systems (IDAES) is pushing the frontiers of modeling and optimization for the development and design of innovative advanced energy.

David Miller, NETL’s senior fellow for process systems engineering, leads IDAES and is a featured speaker during the five-day event.

“FOCAPD is held every five years and is designed to provide opportunities for industrial practitioners, academic researchers, and educators to identify new challenges and to promote stronger industrial-academic collaboration in process and product design,” Miller said. “The participants represent a key set of industrial and academic experts who could potentially use NETL’s open source IDAES modeling and optimization platform to support the innovative design of new fossil energy technologies as well as other applications. We are particularly excited to have an opportunity to hold an introductory, hands on tutorial during the conference to help industry practitioners and academic researchers begin using the open-source IDAES computational platform.”

FOCAPD is organized around different topics including: advanced manufacturing and agile design; high performance computing; machine learning; and best practices in design education.

NETL’s IDAES is a collaborative partnership that was established in 2016 to create advanced computational tools to facilitate state-of-the-art design of advanced energy systems. Partners include Sandia National Laboratories, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Carnegie Mellon University, West Virginia University, and Notre Dame University.

NETL’s IDAES work reflects the Lab’s world-renowned computational science and engineering capabilities, which aid in the strategic development of novel technological solutions to provide efficient, reliable and affordable energy for all Americans. To learn more about IDAES and its work, click here.  

In addition to Miller, NETL collaborators speaking at FOCAPD include Lorenz T. Biegler, Ignacio Grossmann, Nikolaos Sahinidis, and Chrysanthos Gounaris.