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From Vertical Farming to Green Steel: Opportunities and Challenges in Renewable Energy Powered Production Systems

To tackle climate change and other environmental and socioeconomic challenges, production systems for supplying food, chemicals and materials are expected to transition from their dependence on fossil fuels to the utilisation of renewable energy. As renewable resources possess rather different characteristics than their fossil counterpart, various challenges will arise which need to be addressed to make the transition successful. This talk shares several studies where mathematical modelling has been used to analyse emerging renewable energy-powered systems, including controlled-environment farming, chemical production and steel making. Through these studies, opportunities and challenges are discussed with respect to the implications of the interconnectedness of multiple resources, the strategies for handling variability in renewable energy supply, and the importance of regional resource synergies.
 

Bio:
Aidong Yang is a professor in the Department of Engineering Science and Senior Research Fellow of Green Templeton College at University of Oxford. Before moving to Oxford in 2014, Aidong was a senior lecturer in the Department of Chemical and Process Engineering at University of Surrey, where he started as a Lecturer in 2007 after holding research positions in several academic organisations in China, the U.S., Germany and the UK. He studied chemical engineering in Hebei University of Technology and Dalian University of Technology and received a bachelor's degree and a Ph.D. in 1992 and 1997, respectively. As a systems engineering researcher, Aidong’s work spans a broad range of mathematical modelling approaches and sustainability-oriented applications. At Oxford, he leads the Environmental and Biological Systems Engineering group in the Department of Engineering Science, currently active in areas including industrial decarbonisation, atmospheric CO2 removal and engineering biology.