Mechanical Engineering
Graduate Seminar
NOTICE OF SEMINAR PRESENTATION
CANDIDATE: Aasef Bin Hasnain
DEGREE SOUGHT: MASc
DATE: 3/6/2026
TIME: 10:30am
PLACE: Room 1102 CEI
TITLE: Numerical Study of Carbon Black Formation with Renewable Feedstocks
Abstract
Carbon blacks are industrially manufactured carbonaceous nanomaterials produced by the partial combustion or pyrolysis of fossil fuel-based feedstocks under controlled conditions. Carbon black serves as a reinforcing, coloring, and conductive agent across diverse applications such as tires, plastics, inks, and automotive coatings. Traditionally derived from non-renewable hydrocarbon sources, the production presents environmental and sustainability challenges. To address these challenges, this study focuses on developing a sustainable pathway for carbon black production by integrating renewable feedstocks into the process modeling framework. The approach involves merging the KAUST detailed chemical mechanism with the surrogate biofuel-based mechanisms, which are then optimised and reduced using Python-based open-source tools to enhance computational feasibility. The ongoing work focuses on implementing the reduced mechanism in commercial CFD software ANSYS Fluent to perform CFD simulations, predicting carbon black formation and growth behavior using surrogate fuels derived from renewable feedstocks.