Release Date: August 15, 2012

AVESTAR™ Captures Prestigious Technology Transfer Award

NETL is proud to announce that Dr. Stephen Zitney, along with research engineers Mr. Eric Liese and Dr. Priyadarshi Mahapatra, have earned a 2012 Federal Laboratory Consortium (FLC) Technology Transfer award in the Mid-Atlantic region for their work developing the AVESTAR™ (“Advanced Virtual Energy Simulation Training And Research”) system.

NETL’s FLC Technology Transfer Award recipients, Priyadarshi Mahapatra, Stephen Zitney, and Eric Liese

The FLC awards are given each year to recognize a select group of federal laboratory employees who performed outstanding work in technology transfer over the past year. The awards have been presented yearly since 1984 to encourage excellence in development and transfer to the public domain of products and services that will keep our nation on the leading edge of advanced technologies.

Technology transfer - moving a new technology from the inventor's workbench or laboratory to a company that will market the product - is the crucial and essential step that makes an invention available to the nation. Inventing and developing energy technologies, and shepherding them from conception, development, testing, and on to commercial marketing: these are NETL’s goals in support of DOE’s mission to advance the national, economic, and energy security of the United States.

The AVESTAR dynamic simulator is a high-fidelity, real-time operator training system that provides hands-on training for operations, control, and safety of integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC) power plants with CO₂ capture. The AVESTAR system - for the first time - puts together a simulation that includes gasification, a CO₂ capture process, and combined-cycle power. The AVESTAR system’s purpose is to accelerate progress toward operational excellence for IGCC systems and other clean energy plants.

AVESTAR Center for workforce training, engineering education, and advanced R&D on the operation and control of clean energy plants

This outstanding combination of simulator software technology provides workforce training for industry, engineering education for students, and advanced research and development opportunities for those involved in the power industry. By providing risk-free instruction outside of a working power plant, the AVESTAR system can develop a qualified workforce well prepared to operate, control, and manage the advanced commercial-scale IGCC power plants with carbon capture that are predicted by experts to represent the future of clean coal technology.

IGCC systems offer many advantages over traditional plants, including cleaner operation, increased efficiency, and lower cost of electricity when capturing CO₂. Another strong point of IGCC plants is that they are fuel-flexible - they can operate on coal, our nation’s most abundant energy resource, or biomass, or nearly any other carbon-containing fuel. Further, the synthesis gas (syngas) produced by gasification can do more than supply power - it can also be processed to produce specialty chemicals, clean hydrogen, and transportation fuels. Two IGCC electric power plants are now commercially operational in the United States, and others are currently being planned.

The AVESTAR system’s realistic simulation-based training for IGCC plant operation allows crucial skill development for control room operators and engineers. Training covers a wide range of operating scenarios, including normal full-load operation, plant startup and shutdown, and variable CO₂ capture rates. The IGCC dynamic simulator also lets users analyze the plant’s response to malfunctions or disturbance such as fluctuating coal composition.
 
NETL partner, Fossil Consulting Services, provides a portfolio of 5- and 10-day courses at two AVESTAR centers, located at NETL’s Morgantown, WV, site and at West Virginia University in Morgantown. The course offerings include both familiarization classes and comprehensive courses that instruct on background and theory, both followed by hands-on simulator sessions to put information learned into practice.

NETL’s AVESTAR Center is transferring technology, knowledge, and experience with IGCC operations and control in the following ways:

• Through funds-in agreement with trainees who contract to take and pay for AVESTAR training courses.
• Through non-exclusive software license agreements to transfer the IGCC dynamic simulator to third parties.
• By offering run-time versions of the IGCC dynamic simulators to the Electric Power Research Institute and three of their CoalFleet members (BP Alternative Energy, Doosan, and Southern Company) for their participation in the simulator development project, so they can train operators, engineers, and researchers.
• Through a software license agreement with West Virginia University to provide their students with experiential IGCC simulation-based learning for engineering students and researchers.
• Through a memorandum of understanding with Pierpont Community & Technical College in Fairmont, WV, to offer simulation-based training at the AVESTAR Center to students enrolled in a power plant certificate program, sponsored by FirstEnergy Corporation.
• By collaborative research and development with URS Corporation - a leading provider of engineering services around the world - and five nationally recognized universities: Carnegie Mellon University, Pennsylvania State University, the University of Pittsburgh, Virginia Tech, and West Virginia University, all members of the NETL-Regional University Alliance.
• Through a license agreement granting commercialization rights to Invensys Operations Management - a leading provider of automation technologies, systems, and software solutions - to allow them to market and sell the NETL technology as a generic IGCC dynamic simulator and also to use it as the basis for developing customized, plant-specific simulators.

Trainees use AVESTAR's IGCC dynamic simulator and operator training system.

NETL and its partners are continuing to build the AVESTAR portfolio of dynamic simulators, 3D virtual immersive training systems, and advanced research capabilities to satisfy industry’s growing need for training and experience in the operation and control of clean energy plants. Future dynamic simulators under development include natural gas combined cycle and supercritical pulverized coal plants with post-combustion CO₂ capture.

The coveted FLC technology transfer award will be presented to Dr. Zitney, Mr. Liese, and Dr. Mahapatra on August 30, 2012, at the FLC Northeast and Mid-Atlantic Region’s meeting in Cambridge, Maryland.