Webinar title: Digital Intelligence-Driven Technologies and Applications for Comprehensive Industrial Pollution Control
Speaker: Hongbin Cao
Webinar time: April 17, 2024 (Wednesday) 14:00
Venue: Offline, Room 231, New Environmental Building
Inviter: Zehui Li, Xinde Cao
Abstract:
In the context of China's dual carbon objectives, the industrial sector faces significant challenges in simultaneously addressing carbon reduction and environmental pollution control. The strategy of concurrently reducing pollution and carbon emissions while enhancing efficiency is pivotal for fostering green industrial development. However, the reliance on innovation at the unit technology level is becoming progressively more difficult and costlier, which hampers sustainable industrial advancement. Traditional methods based on experiential estimations, simplistic calculations, and trial and error are inadequate for achieving systemic optimization and unlocking synergistic effects among units. To address this, the concept of comprehensive industrial pollution control has been introduced. This approach aims to minimize the overall costs of industrial processes by developing a full-process, multi-scale integrated optimization model tailored for complex, nonlinear industrial systems. By leveraging digital technologies and artificial intelligence, this model underpins the development of a synergistic control system for industrial carbon and pollution. It efficiently identifies the most cost-effective, low-carbon, and environmentally compliant integrated solutions, thereby unleashing the potential of digital technologies and empowering industries with agile decision-making and intelligent upgrades. Successful demonstrations have been conducted in areas such as water network optimization in steel industrial parks, optimization of wastewater treatment in the coal chemical industry, and the integrated optimization of the recycling process for retired lithium batteries. These initiatives provide high-quality data and technical support for comprehensive industrial pollution control and foster a shift in the paradigm of scientific research.
About the speaker:
Dr. Hongbin Cao is a professor at the Institute of Process Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and is a fellow of the Chinese Society of Environmental Sciences. His recognitions include the National Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars, the "Ten Thousand Talents" program for technological innovation leaders, the Guanghua Engineering Science and Technology Award - Youth Award, the He Liang He Li Science and Technology Innovation Award, and the National Award for Innovation Excellence. Cao led the establishment of the CAS Data Center for Chemical Sciences. He also holds positions as deputy director of the National Engineering Center for the Green Recycling of Strategic Metal Resources and director of the Beijing Process Pollution Control Engineering Technology Research Center. He holds additional positions as the chairman of the Metallurgy Committee of the China Environmental Protection Industry Association, an executive director of the Chinese Society of Environmental Sciences, the deputy chairman of its Solid Waste Division, the deputy editor of Industrial Water Treatment, and serves on the editorial boards of Journal of Environmental Sciences, Green Chemical Engineering, China Environmental Science, and China Scientific Data. His innovations focus on efficient separation, integrating multi-process optimizations from production to end-of-life stages to develop a high-efficiency pollution reduction and carbon emission technology system. This system has been successfully implemented in over 120 engineering projects across the coal chemical, non-ferrous metal, and steel industries, achieving significant economic, environmental, and social benefits. He has published nearly 400 SCI papers, authored 20 monographs in both Chinese and English, and holds 161 authorized invention patents. As the lead researcher, he has received one Second-Class National Award for Technological Invention, one Second-Class National Science and Technology Progress Award, one Special-Class Association Award, and four First-Class awards from various provincial and professional societies.