• Energy Research

The study investigated the effect of a CO2 tax to encourage the adoption of Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) as an alternative to fossil fuels for power generation in the UK. The trade-offs of different SMR placement policy options with respect to the competing objectives of minimising transmission losses and population risk were investigated to understand the impact on the optimal placement and usage of SMRs at different carbon tax levels. Different assumptions about renewable power availability were explored. The study identified the most cost-effective number of SMRs per site and optimised the power flow for cost efficiency. Regardless of renewable power availability, a carbon tax in the range of £45–60/t was found to incentivise the full adoption of SMRs with a levelised cost of electricity of £60/MWh versus £0–20/t at £40/MWh. The SMR placement influenced the performance and cost of the energy system, as well as whether a region acted as a net importer or exporter of energy. The most cost-effective solutions were achieved by balancing transmission loss and population risk.

In this work, a new OntoPESScan ontology is developed for the semantic representation of one-dimensional potential energy surface (PES) scans, a central concept in computational chemistry. This ontology is developed in line with knowledge graph principles and The World Avatar (TWA) project. OntoPESScan is linked to other ontologies for chemistry in TWA, including OntoSpecies, which helps uniquely identify species along the PES and access their properties, and OntoCompChem, which allows the association of potential energy surfaces with quantum chemical calculations and the concepts used to derive them. A force-field fitting agent is also developed that makes use of the information in the OntoPESScan ontology to fit force fields to reactive surfaces of interest on the fly by making use of the empirical valence bond methodology. This agent is demonstrated to successfully parametrize two cases, namely, a PES scan on ethanol and a PES scan on a localized π-radical PAH hypothesized to play a role in soot formation during combustion. OntoPESScan is an extension to the capabilities of TWA and, in conjunction with potential further ontological support for molecular dynamics and reactions, will further progress toward an open, continuous, and self-growing knowledge graph for chemistry.

In this paper, we develop a knowledge graph-based framework for the automated calibration of combustion reaction mechanisms and demonstrate its effectiveness on a case study of poly(oxymethylene)dimethyl ether (PODEn, where n = 3) oxidation. We develop an ontological representation for combustion experiments, OntoChemExp, that allows for the semantic enrichment of experiments within the J-Park simulator (JPS, theworldavatar.com), an existing cross-domain knowledge graph. OntoChemExp is fully capable of supporting experimental results in the Process Informatics Model (PrIMe) database. Following this, a set of software agents are developed to perform experimental result retrieval, sensitivity analysis, and calibration tasks. The sensitivity analysis agent is used for both generic sensitivity analyses and reaction selection for subsequent calibration. The calibration process is performed as a sampling task, followed by an optimization task. The agents are designed for use with generic models but are demonstrated with ignition delay time and laminar flame speed simulations. We find that calibration times are reduced, while accuracy is increased compared to manual calibration, achieving a 79% decrease in the objective function value, as defined in this study. Further, we demonstrate how this workflow is implemented as an extension of the JPS.

In this paper, we demonstrate through examples how the concept of a Semantic Web based knowledge graph can be used to integrate combustion modeling into cross-disciplinary applications and in particular how inconsistency issues in chemical mechanisms can be addressed. We discuss the advantages of linked data that form the essence of a knowledge graph and how we implement this in a number of interconnected ontologies, specifically in the context of combustion chemistry. Central to this is OntoKin, an ontology we have developed for capturing both the content and the semantics of chemical kinetic reaction mechanisms. OntoKin is used to represent the example mechanisms from the literature in a knowledge graph, which itself is part of the existing, more general knowledge graph and ecosystem of autonomous software agents that are acting on it. We describe a web interface, which allows users to interact with the system, upload and compare the existing mechanisms, and query species and reactions across the knowledge graph. The utility of the knowledge-graph approach is demonstrated for two use-cases: querying across multiple mechanisms from the literature and modeling the atmospheric dispersion of pollutants emitted by ships. As part of the query use-case, our ontological tools are applied to identify variations in the rate of a hydrogen abstraction reaction from methane as represented by 10 different mechanisms.