Group News

Check out our recent Media and news below!

Recent News Linked in https://www.linkedin.com/in/joan-cordiner/

Critical materials - reducing demand and ensuring sustainabilityExplore a new report from the NEPC about resource efficiency and demand reduction for critical materials to support the UK’s existing Net Zero Strategy.

Royal Academy Report Launched

Top Gear From BBC

Banning vapes could help manage EV battery parts supplies, say UK engineersChemical engineering boffins are concerned about the supplies of finite resources for our battery-powered devices

New report highlights how to improve critical material sustainability in the UKA new report published by the National Engineering Policy Centre has called on the UK Government to develop an integrated materials strategy. Led by the Royal Academy of Engineering, the report emphas

Top Engineers Urge Lithium Recycling, Demand CutUniversity of Sheffield engineering professor Joan Cordiner has worked on a new report highlighting how the way we consume critical materials is

Congratulations to Louis Allen for being names a finalist for the Institution of Chemical Engineers (IChemE) Global Awards 2024 in the Young Researchers category!

New Papers Alert from Mojtaba Hoseini and our students

A novel framework for quantitative resilience assessment in complex engineering systems during early and late design stagesRecently, resilience assessment has evolved and grown in prominence, yet most studies are carried out on operational stage when sufficient knowledge o…

Development of an industrially applicable model for the qualitative resilience assessment of process systems at the early design stageTraditional design methodologies do not effectively extend to consider a resilient system capable of absorbing disruptions and recovering from their c…

Fuelling the Future with Safe Hydrogen Transportation Through Natural Gas Pipelines: A Quantitative Risk Assessment Approach - Transactions of the Indian National Academy of EngineeringThe global transition to clean and sustainable energy sources has sparked interest in hydrogen as a potential solution to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Efficient and safe transportation of hydrogen is crucial for its integration into the energy network. One approach is utilizing existing natural gas infrastructure, but it introduces unique challenges. Hydrogen has distinct characteristics that pose potential hazards, requiring careful consideration for safe transportation through natural gas pipelines. Moreover, the absence of field data on component failure rates adds to the existing uncertainty in Quantitative Risk Assessment (QRA) for hydrogen transportation. QRA plays a vital role in enabling the safe deployment of hydrogen transportation through existing pipelines and is increasingly integrated into the permitting process. The lack of data impedes the comprehensive understanding of risks associated with hydrogen transportation. This paper aims not only to analyse the effects of hydrogen blending ratios on gas dispersion, release rates, jet fires, and explosions in natural gas pipelines, but also highlight the disparities in leak frequencies currently used for hydrogen or blended hydrogen. A QRA for hydrogen blending in natural gas pipelines is novel and timely because the behaviour of hydrogen in natural gas pipelines, a novel process with potential hazards, is not fully understood. Conducting a thorough QRA on hydrogen blending in gas pipelines, our study reveals innovative insights: higher blending ratios reduce release rates, impact safe distances, and maintain stable flame lengths. Despite an elevated explosion risk, scenarios remained below lethal overpressure values. This paper offers unique contributions to safety considerations in hydrogen transportation, guiding stakeholders toward informed decisions for a secure and sustainable energy future.

Knowledge-Enhanced Spatiotemporal Analysis for Anomaly Detection in Process ManufacturingEffective fault detection and diagnosis (FDD) is crucial for proactively identifying irregular states that could jeopardize operator well-being and pr…

Louis Presents at Escape

Louis Allen presented his research on improving sustainable wastewater treatment plant (WWTP) operations through energy consumption forecasting at the ESCAPE34 /

#PSE24 conference in Florence.

By combining causal inference, domain knowledge, and deep learning, our approach identifies hidden relationships, captures WWTP dynamics, and achieves state-of-the-art performance in energy consumption forecasting. This comprehensive framework empowers WWTP operators to optimise energy efficiency, reduce costs, and mitigate environmental impact.

DigiMOF: A Database of Metal–Organic Framework Synthesis Information Generated via Text MiningThe vastness of materials space, particularly that which is concerned with metal–organic frameworks (MOFs), creates the critical problem of performing efficient identification of promising materials for specific applications. Although high-throughput computational approaches, including the use of machine learning, have been useful in rapid screening and rational design of MOFs, they tend to neglect descriptors related to their synthesis. One way to improve the efficiency of MOF discovery is to data-mine published MOF papers to extract the materials informatics knowledge contained within journal articles. Here, by adapting the chemistry-aware natural language processing tool, ChemDataExtractor (CDE), we generated an open-source database of MOFs focused on their synthetic properties: the DigiMOF database. Using the CDE web scraping package alongside the Cambridge Structural Database (CSD) MOF subset, we automatically downloaded 43,281 unique MOF journal articles, extracted 15,501 unique MOF materials, and text-mined over 52,680 associated properties including the synthesis method, solvent, organic linker, metal precursor, and topology. Additionally, we developed an alternative data extraction technique to obtain and transform the chemical names assigned to each CSD entry in order to determine linker types for each structure in the CSD MOF subset. This data enabled us to match MOFs to a list of known linkers provided by Tokyo Chemical Industry UK Ltd. (TCI) and analyze the cost of these important chemicals. This centralized, structured database reveals the MOF synthetic data embedded within thousands of MOF publications and contains further topology, metal type, accessible surface area, largest cavity diameter, pore limiting diameter, open metal sites, and density calculations for all 3D MOFs in the CSD MOF subset. The DigiMOF database and associated software are publicly available for other researchers to rapidly search for MOFs with specific properties, conduct further analysis of alternative MOF production pathways, and create additional parsers to search for additional desirable properties.

Launch of UK-Hyres

Sheffield is leading the safety and environmental cross cutting themes

https://ukhyres.co.uk/

19/06/2023 - One of our PhD students, Louis Allen, presents his work on fault detection and diagnosis in the process industries at ESCAPE33 conference in Athens.

Check out a recording of Joan talking to Nature about the barriers between moving from academia to Industry and vice versa, and what we should be doing to reduce this!

Beyond academia: Breaking down the barriers that curtail industry collaborations and career movesHow porous is the metaphorical membrane between academia and industry? Julie Gould finds out.

Group News

Prof Joan Cordiner gave the Plenary Lecture at Fluidization XVII May 21st 2023

Ana Jiménez Franco wins the poster prize at Biteg 2022

13/11/2022

Victoria Shields Louis Allen and Mahdi Presents at Fall AiChE

18/07/2022

Well done to all the group members that have had abstracts accepted for poster and oral presentations at the AIChE conference in Arizona this November!

10/07/2022

Shout out to MEng researcher Freya Vesey for getting her work on resilience accepted at the Hazards 32 conference in proceedings and oral presentation, fantastic work!

01/07/2022

We would like to welcome Dr. Seyed Mojtaba Hoseyni to the group. Dr Hoseyni will be starting in July as a new research associate in the Cordiner Group looking at the prediction of maintenance and process optimization.

21/06/2022

Well done to our group member Louis who has just presented his poster "Wiz 4.0: A novel data visualization and analytics dashboard for a graphical approach to industry 4.0." at the PSE2021+ conference in Kyoto along with co-author Jack Atkinson!

26/04/2022

Welcome to the new Cordiner Group webpage!

Augmented Reality for Enhanced Visualization of MOF AdsorbentsAugmented reality (AR) is an emerging technique used to improve visualization and comprehension of complex 3D materials. This approach has been applied not only in the field of chemistry but also in real estate, physics, mechanical engineering, and many other areas. Here, we demonstrate the workflow for an app-free AR technique for visualization of metal–organic frameworks (MOFs) and other porous materials to investigate their crystal structures, topology, and gas adsorption sites. We think this workflow will serve as an additional tool for computational and experimental scientists working in the field for both research and educational purposes.

Proud of our Chemical and Biological Engineering staff and students attending AIChE fall conference in Orlando.

Rachael Rothman Rachel Smith Jim Litster Louis Allen Mahdi Ahmed Alasdair Campbell Ioanna (Ioni) Kalospyrou

Development of a machine learning framework to determine optimal alloy composition based on steel hardenability predictionMechanical property prediction plays a crucial role in the steel industry, enabling better materials selection and enhancing production efficiency. In…

29/08/2023

Congratulations to Louis Allen and all involved in publishing the paper titled - Development of a machine learning framework to determine optimal alloy composition based on steel hardenability prediction.

Congratulations to Victoria!

Also Sept 2023 New Paper

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2667378923000548?via%3Dihub

Gold recovery from synthetic mine tailings leachate using chelating ion exchange resins with thiosulfate-thiourea lixiviant Victoria R. Shields a, Thomas J Robshaw b, Christopher P. Porter c, James T.M. Amphlett d, Alan Hides e, Richard Bruce e, Joan Cordiner f, Mark D. Ogden g

New Paper June 2023

Multiple-output Gaussian Process based Global Sensitivity Analysis for the cost performance of electric vehicle in the United Kingdom

Min Tao a, Jude O. Ejeh a, Robert A. Milton a, Joan Cordiner a, Solomon F. Brown a

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/B9780443152740502286

Multiple-output Gaussian Process based Global Sensitivity Analysis for the cost-performance of electric vehicle in the United KingdomTransportation is one of the major sources of greenhouse gas (GHG) in the United Kingdom (UK), which motivates the government’s policies to perform el…

Ethics Series - A Circle of TrustJoan Cordiner discusses the world of professional ethics

Damage to Nord Stream undersea pipelines was sabotage, top EU diplomat says and warns of retaliationSeismologists reported on Tuesday that explosions rattled the Baltic Sea before unusual leaks were discovered on two underwater natural gas pipelines running from Russia to Germany.

Paper and front cover of journal- published by Lawson Grasby

DigiMOF: A Database of Metal–Organic Framework Synthesis Information Generated via Text Mining

Lawson T. Glasby, Kristian Gubsch, Rosalee Bence, Rama Oktavian, Kesler Isoko, Seyed Mohamad Moosavi, Joan L. Cordiner, Jason C. Cole and Peyman Z. Moghadam*

Brothers celebrate same-day graduation as first-class chemical engineersBrothers Mahdi and Nabhan Ahmed - the first in their family to go to university - describe the pride they feel in their achievements as they graduate together from The University of Sheffield’s Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering.

15/09/2022

Massive congratulations to our new PhD student, Mahdi, and his brother Nabhan - the first in their family to go to university – for graduating this summer with a first-class MEng and PhD in Chemical Engineering respectively. Mahdi will join the group as a full-time PhD from September while Nabhan begins his career as a senior process engineer with Keurig Dr Pepper.

Well done to both brothers, what a fantastic achievement!

24/08/2022

Well done to those involved in publishing a new paper – Integrating machine learning techniques into optimal maintenance scheduling! See below for more information.

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