Dr. Khalid Al Ali received his BSc in Mechanical Engineering from the United Arab Emirates University, Al Ain, UAE, in 2006. Following that, he worked for three years as a site integrity engineer for oil and gas company ADMA-OPCO in Abu-Dhabi, UAE. He got hands-on experience through in-service inspection, ensuring that equipment remained safe to operate within defined operating boundaries. After this work experience, Dr. Al Ali joined the Masdar Institute Fellowship Program to obtain his MSc and PhD degrees in Chemical Engineering from the Tokyo Institute of Technology, Tokyo, Japan, in 2011 and 2014, respectively. During his PhD program, he was involved in the study of solar-assisted methane reforming in a direct contact bubble reactor, and solar biomass gasification. Dr. Al Ali joined Masdar Institute (now Khalifa University), in late 2014 and is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering.
Dr. Al Ali is a visiting scholar in the Green Group at MIT since 2016. He joined the group for one year long and is involved in a collaborative research project with Prof. William Green on the topic of solar thermochemical decomposition of hydrogen sulfide. The concept is to use the plentiful solar energy available in Abu Dhabi to convert toxic H2S (produced in large quantities in Abu Dhabi as a waste product of oil refining, and also from the gas sweetening process) into valuable hydrogen (H2), with many environmental and practical advantages.
At Khalifa University, Dr. Al Ali鈥檚 current research focuses on solar fuel production, which is based on thermochemical processes for the synthesis of gas/hydrogen production. His interests are in the exploration of reaction mechanisms networks and discovering the subset of species and reactions that are able to represent the macroscopic properties of the complete reaction network. Predicting detailed chemical kinetics and mechanisms are necessary for the simulation of today鈥檚 complex processes including, pyrolysis, biomass transforming, hydrocarbons reforming, water/H2S splitting, and CO2 capture, utilization, and conversion.
