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Manufacturers are starting to embrace the concept of a circular economy, which seeks to make products that are more durable and easier to reuse and recycle. It can be anything from an automaker creating components in a way that makes them easier to disassemble and reuse again, to breaking down old products and waste materials into elements that can be used to make new sustainable products.
It is this latter area where Encina, a company whose mission is to “catalyze the transition to a sustainable, circular economy” is focusing its efforts. It produces circular chemicals from end-of-life plastics, which can be hard to dispose of, and single-use plastics, such as those used in packaging, electronics, car parts, and more. To accomplish this, Encina partnered with CPFD Software to design next-generation recycling facilities.
Simulations critical to scaling up operations
Encina uses proprietary technology on plastic waste. “These difficult-to-recycle plastics are our focus, trying to get them into a circular system,” said Sheida Sahandy, Chief Sustainability Officer at Encina. “We’re giving these molecules a kind of infinite life—they can come in as waste and go back out to become almost anything.”
To do this, Encina breaks down long hydrocarbon chains into shorter hydrocarbon components or monomers using catalytic processes. The end products of these processes are circular base chemicals Benzene, Toluene, Xylene, and Propylene (BTX/P). Encina’s customers use these chemicals to produce manufactured circular and renewable products of their own.
The work requires a physical facility with large reactors to run the complex chemical process of breaking down plastic waste. Encina has already proven its technology at a process demonstration unit in Texas, and the company is in the process of constructing its first commercial-scale circular manufacturing facility in Pennsylvania.
Enter CPFD Software. Its Barracuda Virtual Reactor simulates 3D, transient behavior in fluid-particle systems such as those encountered in chemical reactions. CPFD’s clients use the solution to optimize processes and confidently scale-up operations. The software has become the industry standard tool for troubleshooting, scaling, and reducing the environmental impact of existing chemical processes while accelerating the research, development, and deployment of newer sustainability and circular economy initiatives.
Enter Microsoft Azure high-performance computing (HPC) and accelerated computing from NVIDIA. Designing Encina’s hardware using the CPFD Barracuda Virtual Reactor requires enormous computational capacity. The companies ran one of the largest real-world Virtual Reactor simulations ever on a public cloud platform, taking advantage of an advanced system from Azure and full-stack accelerated computing from NVIDIA.
“We were early adopters of parallelization on NVIDIA technology,” says Peter Blaser, Vice President of Operations at CPFD Software. CPFD makes use of NVIDIA GPUs for accelerated computing and includes multiple-GPU parallelization capabilities enabling Barracuda Virtual Reactor to scale and run on HPC systems, such as NVIDIA DGX™ hardware systems and Azure GPU-accelerated virtual machines (VMs) with multiple GPUs.
The results of the simulations and key points include:
- The project used an ND A100 v4-series VM with eight NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs available.
- The NVIDIA Ampere generation of GPU cards running Virtual Reactor simulations was about three times faster than previous generations of V100 GPUs. Running on a four-GPU VM, simulations were completed 400 times faster than on an on-premises CPU-based workstation.
- To demonstrate the power of GPU speedups, CPFD revisited a 2012 simulation running on CPUs that modeled 400,000 cells and 6 million computational particles, which would have taken three years to complete and was never finished. Today, a comparable model running on Azure HPC can be completed in 13 hours.
- In addition to exponentially faster model completion, these speedups allow running larger domain models—models with finer spatial resolution, more detailed physics, and more complex chemical reactions.
- CPFD and Azure achieved a 506X speed boost running a large-scale model on a single Azure VM compared to the CPU version of the results.
Putting this compute power into perspective, a comparable company-built system would cost more than $100,000. An additional benefit of using these cloud capabilities is that Azure and NVIDIA constantly upgrade their technologies. Thus, Encina always has access to the most performant technology available at any given time; technology purpose-built for HPC and AI workloads.
Bringing it full circle
The aim of Encina’s work is to move beyond traditional mechanical recycling, which is currently the dominant recycling technique for plastic waste. Mechanical processes are only effective for a few types of plastic, so their use is limited. And its use tends to degrade the quality and color of the plastic, so the plastic can only be recycled a few times.
In contrast, Encina’s processing can be applied to a wider range of plastics. That makes it more effective in reducing waste that now ends up in the wrong places. In addition, the process does not cause the same degradation. So, the materials can be used repeatedly to make new products that meet high quality, purity and color standards.
Building systems to do the processing and scaling up operations are complex tasks. Working with CPFD and using Azure’s infrastructure powered by NVIDIA GPUs, Encina can run simulations that allow the company to optimize reactor design and mitigate risks. That, in turn, lets Encina participate in the circular economy.
Learn more
Find out more about Encina.
Find out more about CFPD.
Learn more about Azure HPC and AI Infrastructure.
Learn more about NVIDIA helping power a sustainable future.
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