Networking reception and poster session – September 2016 Edinburgh Biannual

This blog was written by Xin Yang, a PhD student at the University of Sheffield, who received funding from the ECR Meeting Fund to attend the UKCCSRC Autumn 2016 Biannual Meeting in Edinburgh, 14-15 September.

I am very glad that I could have an opportunity to attend the UKCCSRC Edinburgh Biannual Meeting. What impressed me most was that the conference not only focused on research presentation, but also paid great attention to network building and face-to-face communication among participants. At the conference, there were the networking reception, poster session and data archive drop in session. The sessions started at 18:00 at John Mclntyre Conference Centre and the sessions lasted for one and a half hours. These sessions offer a platform for participants to communicate with each other, and share their research with other researchers in the field.

At the networking reception, participants from different backgrounds (academia, industry and government), holding a glass of wine or juice, got together and discussed recent advances in the field of carbon capture and storage (CCS) and the update of government policies. It is a good chance for each participant to meet old friends and make new friends at the networking reception. For me, with the help of Prof Mohamed Pourkashanian and Dr Karen Finney, I was very happy to meet Prof Paul Fennell from Imperial College London, which helps to build my network at the conference. We discussed the progress of our recent research on ash deposition issues of biomass combustion and the corporation on this research regarding the characterisation of ash composition for the ash samples in the future. At the data archive drop in session, Dr Maxine Akhurst and Mary Mowat from British Geological Survey, who host the UKCCSRC data and information archive, took charge of this useful session. The data and results from the UKCCSRC projects and EPSRC projects related to CCS can be acquired from the data and information archive. The session is of great help to those who want to use the data and information from the archive and who were going to prepare data for the archive.

The poster session was another highlight of the meeting. It is very important to have a better understand of the advances in CCS through the poster session. The posters included the advances of the UKCCSRC projects Call 1 and Call 2, the EPSRC industrial CCS projects and the EU CCS projects, etc. The topics of poster session covered the research in the carbon capture technologies (Post-combustion capture systems, Pre-combustion capture systems, and Oxy-fuel capture systems), the carbon storage technologies and the economic analysis of CCS. Presenters introduced their research and explained the details in their research to audiences before their posters and attempted to answer the questions raised by audiences. As an audience, I was interested in the research of the poster titled ‘CO₂ flow metering through multi-modal sensing and statistical data fusion’. The research, which can help to prevent the CO₂ leakage during the transportation of CO₂ to the desired storage sites, aims to develop an accurate method based on statistical data fusion to measure and monitor the CO₂ flow across the CCS chain. Since the neutral network was employed in the statistical data fusion method, I discussed with Mr Jinyu Liu (who is the poster presenter from University of Kent) about the neutral network model because the prediction from the neutral network may be different even using same inputs. In the research, a large number of database could be employed in the model and the parameters in the model would be optimized in order to improve the measurement performance. After the interesting discussion with Jinyu Liu, I understood that optimization of the parameters in each sub-models is very important in order to build the statistical data fusion method. Poster session not only helps presenters to introduce the advances in their research to others and possibly increase the impact of their research, but also help participants to have a better understanding of the CCS technologies.

It is very interesting that we can have the networking reception, poster session and data archive drop in session. Networking can be kept with old friends and made with new friends. A poster session is a good way to broadcast the advances of the CCS technologies and bring participants together to have discussions on CCS related topics. The Data archive drop in session can help participants to use the UKCCSRC database which could support their future research. Through these sessions, more face-to-face discussions can be done to understand topics in the CCS technologies and help to find out the status and the advance of CCS technologies and the future corporations in the research among participants.

***Available posters presented can be viewed on the event page***