Coffee and snacks will precede the seminar at 3 p.m. in the Ford ES&T atrium (first floor)
Claire Adjiman, Professor of Chemical Engineering, Imperial College London
"Engineering molecules for sustainability and function"
Virtual Link: https://gatech.zoom.us/j/99488216265?pwd=a0hBZVNMcDZ0VHBCbTZpaXlUc3Nvdz09
Abstract:
The performance of manufacturing processes and of chemical products is heavily influenced by the choices of molecules and materials that are used. These choices are often made early on in process or product development, without considering all implications in terms of overall performance. The decisions that are made at an early conceptual stage of design often limit subsequent options and hence the environmental, health, safety and economic performance that can be achieved. In this talk, we explore the extent to which taking a more integrated view, across the molecular and process/product scales, can bring benefits. Given the large number of possible designs and the complexity of considering multiple perspectives simultaneously, we also highlight the modelling and algorithmic challenges that must be overcome to enable integrated design. We then focus on two specific application areas, illustrating how some of these challenges can be addressed: the integrated design of solvents and processes for carbon dioxide capture and the use of computational tools to screen coformers in developing a crystalline product. In both cases, the availability of property prediction techniques that achieve a suitable balance between accuracy and performance is critical. We also present algorithms to overcome some of the numerical challenges at hand and demonstrate their application.
Bio:
Claire is Professor of Chemical Engineering at Imperial College London. She holds an MEng from Imperial College and a PhD from Princeton University, both in Chemical Engineering. Her research interests include integrated process and molecular/materials design, including the development of design methods, property prediction techniques and optimisation algorithms. She works extensively with industry, especially the oil and gas, pharmaceuticals and agrochemicals sectors and has licensed thermodynamic modelling software. She has received awards that include a RAEng-ICI Fellowship, the Philip Leverhulme Prize for Engineering (2009), the SCI Armstrong Lecture, an EPSRC Leadership Fellowship, the RSC Elizabeth Colbourn Memorial Lecture and the AIChE’s CAST Computing in Chemical Engineering Award. She is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, the Institution of Chemical Engineers and the Royal Society of Chemistry and an International Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She was a Founding Co-Director of Imperial’s Institute for Molecular Science and Engineering (2015-2020) and Director of the Sargent Centre for Process Systems Engineering (2016-2022).