Decarbonising cement and lime with Qarnot's cloud computing services
Leilac is accelerating a just transition to net zero by providing the most compelling decarbonization solution for global cement and lime industry.
Leilac’s kiln technology efficiently separates unavoidable carbon emissions ready for use or storage, without additional chemicals or processes. It is designed to be scalable, retrofittable, energy agnostic and electrification ready, providing flexible and economical pathways to carbon free cement and lime.
We also work with Heirloom, a direct air capture (DAC) company that is permanently removing carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere, to deploy Leilac’s renewably powered electric kilns at future Heirloom DAC facilities.
Heirloom will use Leilac’s technology to heat limestone to produce high purity CO2, which will go for permanent storage, and calcium oxide, which will be used in a novel carbonation process to directly capture CO2 from the air and reform limestone. After binding and removing CO2 from the air, the reformed limestone is fed back into the Leilac kiln, where the CO2 is separated and captured, and the cycle begins again.
The CO2 removed from the air will be mineralised, where it is bound to rocks or other materials, or injected underground into existing natural geological structures, where it remains safely and permanently stored. The integrated Heirloom and Leilac DAC solution will be 100% renewably powered to deliver the maximum net reduction of atmospheric CO2.
The project's technical essentials:
· Industry: Numerical Simulations (CFD, Combustion)
· Software: Ansys Fluent
· Hardware: 128 cores cluster, Dual Intel Xeon, RoCE interconnect
· Challenges: Scale a simulation on hundreds of cores
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Why did Leilac select Qarnot as its provider of its large-scale computing services?
Performing CFD simulations at industrial scale requires considerable time and storage if a standard workstation is used, but computations can be scaled down if multiple cores are used in parallel. The only practical way to run these kinds of high quality CFD investigations in a reasonable timeframe is using high-performance computing resources from a company like Qarnot.
Access scalable computing resources
Creating massive computing clusters brings its unique challenges, as bottlenecks may appear which will slow down the simulation speedup. Qarnot's unique software and hardware expertise helped us choose the perfect configuration depending on the simulation size and the time restrictions.Easy management of usage and costs
By using Qarnot, we have access to multiple licensing options, which can be chosen depending on the current need, including bring your own license (BYOL), hosted on the cloud or on-demand with elastic core scaling.Providing dedicated support
Qarnot's engineers are committed to understanding our needs, ensuring prompt and responsive supportReducing the carbon footprint of IT workloads
Qarnot reduces the energy needed to cool its machines through the re-use of waste heat to provide large-scale site with significant heat needs and reduces the carbon footprint of IT workloads by 80%. In this way, Leilac and Qarnot are working together to reduce the environmental impact of our activities.Computational Fluid Dynamics: why it's essential?
Leilac’s decarbonisation technology is centred around the use of heat to separate and capture carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from limestone, which are an unavoidable result of the industrial process of making cement and lime. It’s not a small thing. CO2 emissions from cement are estimated to be between 6-8% of annual worldwide emissions, with a little over 1% more coming from lime.
To make our technology work, we need to perform complex simulations, using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) to ensure that heat is used efficiently and responsibly at both smaller and lager industrial scales. High quality CFD analysis allows us to “look inside” our kilns, and deeply understand how heat behaves. It’s complicated because many factors influence the way limestone reactions happen, such as temperature and pressure, flue gas composition, exchanging surface areas, and fuel choice. It is almost impossible to watch the actual reaction taking place inside an extremely hot kiln, which is why this process is so fascinating and almost magical. Thus, it’s this “magic” that our combustion and cement experts are trying to understand by using powerful simulation tools like CFD.
