Valeria Venturelli

About Valeria Venturelli

Affiliation
Politecnico di Milano

Innovandi Project
Core Project 2: Post-combustion electrochemical CO₂ capture for cement plants.

Background
Environmental Engineer from Politecnico di Milano, Italy, specialized in remediation technologies, with postgraduate training in the fields of sustainability analyses, food waste treatments, and waste-to-energy plants.

Research topic
My research topic is focused on the investigation and improvement of an innovative solvent-based post-combustion CO₂ capture technology, where a KOH aqueous solution is used as solvent and regenerated through an electrochemical process, in conditions relevant to the cement industry. It is performed in close collaboration with the Technical University of Denmark, which is in charge of the experimental tests.

The objective of the research is to increase the technology maturity of the process, that can be driven by renewable electricity, thus achieving a truly carbon-neutral capture technology.

My work focuses on process model development and validation in Aspen Plus, assessment of process integration into full-scale cement plants (computing the main techno-economic key performance indicators of the technology and benchmarking with alternative CO₂ capture processes), and analysis of process integration with renewables, exploring the possible flexibility options in response to variable electricity prices.