Fundamentals of Adsorption 12 Conference

June 6, 2016

Researchers from the ARC ITTC for LNG Futures recently attended and presented at the 12th Fundamentals of Adsorption Conference (FOA12) in Friedrichshafen, Germany.

The ITTC team comprised of 7 researchers (pictured) from the University of Western Australian and the University of Queensland.   ITTC Director Professor Eric May attended the conference and described the event as “A very successful conference for the group where we demonstrated our cutting edge research in gas separations”.  The conference is held every three years with the next conference to be hosted in Cairns in 2019.  The ITTC team believe they will be able to play even larger role in FOA13 at Cairns.

Adsorption processes are key in LNG production enabling impurities from methane gas such as carbon dioxide, helium and nitrogen to be removed prior to liquefaction. Adsorption takes place on porous media beds such as zeolites which are able to be continuously regenerated throughout the process.  Training Centre research in this area is focused on synthesising low cost zeolites from fly ash, separating nitrogen and helium from natural gas and synergistic carbon dioxide and water removal in floating LNG Operations.

The ARC ITTC for LNG Futures is a Australian Research Council Industrial Transformation Training Centre. The Centre has $9M in funding from the ARC and 9 Industry Partners over five years. The LNG research has a strong industry focus and aims to increase growth, productivity and capabilities in this key Australian industry.  The flagship project for the training centre is to establish a micro-scale LNG plant and associated research facility. The world first facility will have training, research and demonstration capabilities.  This will help accelerate the deployment of new technology by demonstrating new processes in a live plant environment.

Read more on the Training Centre separations research here