Thesis supervisor: Tamás Kristóf
Location of studies (in Hungarian): University of Pannonia, Institute of Chemistry, Department of Physical Chemistry Abbreviation of location of studies: FKT
Description of the research topic:
Rationalisation of energy consumption and minimisation of use of fossil fuels are utmost parts of coping climate change and global warming, in an effort to keep net CO2 emission and hydrocarbons year-on-year as low as possible. At large scales it means recycling and the use of increasing proportion of biomasses for electricity generation in power plants at industrial scale. The more hygroscopic and acidic biomasses with some percentage of water contents are processed in traditional refineries under conditions with slight modifications compared to technologies of processing fossil fuels. The loss rates of structural materials are to be minimised and the circumstances of contingent local corrosion risks should be clarified and comprehensively delineated for the sake of safe, economical and productivity processing. So, the types, rates and mechanism of corrosion processes of engineering steel alloys should be comprehensively analysed under the conditions relating to co-processing technology. It means hydrogen sulphide and acidic biomass component caused corrosion processes both in the forms of general and local integrity losses. Temperature and pressure dependence of the reactions should be investigated. Characteristics of the mechanisms are to be defined and rate limitations or catalysis effects must be identified. Scaling tendency of steels should be defined depending on corrosion rates, composition of the steels and type of fluid mixtures. In addition to standard corrosion and electrochemical methods, the research work includes utilisation of several experimental techniques such as thermoanalysis, Raman microscopy and reflective FTIR spectroscopy, XPS, optical and SEM coupled with EDS analysis. Experimental data should serve as a basis for theoretical, semi-empirical or mechanistic modelling of the main processes affected by rate limitations and/or catalytic effects.
Required language skills: English Number of students who can be accepted: 1
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