Néstor D. Montiel-Bohórquez

About Néstor D. Montiel-Bohórquez

Affiliation
Politecnico di Milano

Innovandi Project
Core Project 1: Artificial Intelligence for accelerating cement production

Background
I am a Mechanical Engineer with an MSc in Energy Engineering from Universidad de Antioquia, Colombia, specialising in sustainable industrial innovations. My research focuses on advancing Carbon Capture and Utilization (CCUS) technologies and integrating them with industry sectors. As a PhD student at Politecnico di Milano, I am currently engaged in different projects that apply machine learning to optimise cement production and integrate CCUS in steelmaking.

Research topic
In Core Project 1, my work focuses on developing process models of clinker production and its combination with ML approaches for developing surrogate models as an alternative to physics-based process models.
My contribution to CP1 consists of implementing and calibrating process models of the clinker production process for several real plants. Then, the calibrated models are used to simulate the plants based on actual operation data as inputs; in this way, it is possible to determine the consistency of the measurement from the plants. Additionally, I use process simulations to support our partners’ work on developing ML models to predict clinker composition and pollutant emissions. Besides, I am exploring machine learning (neural networks) and its integration with process modelling to develop surrogate models. The idea is that ML-based surrogate models can replace typical process models in predicting the clinker plant behaviour with the same level of accuracy but requiring fewer computational resources.