We would like to congratulate Thomas Adams, an Associate Professor at McMaster University and former postdoctoral assistant at PSEL, and Dominik Bongartz, group leader at the Chair of Process Systems Engineering at RWTH Aachen University and former PhD student of Alexander Mitsos, for receiving 2021 CAST Division Awards. Dr. Adams has been granted the David Himmelblau Award for…

The newly published article Production of biofuels from sunlight and lignocellulosic sugars using microbial consortia, by J. A. Gomez, K. Höffner and P. I. Barton, can be accessed for free here within the next 50 days. In the article, a raceway pond model incorporating genome-scale metabolic reconstructions is presented. This process model is used to simulate different production scenarios…

We are pleased to inform that Braden Gilleland, a first-year PhD student at PSEL, has been awarded an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. The broad goal of the project is to develop Methane Pyrolysis (or Methane Cracking) as a more economically viable way to decarbonize hydrogen production – which is itself responsible for about 1% of global…

The new article Nonsmooth Hessenberg Differential-Algebraic Equations by Peter Stechlinski and Paul Barton (click here for 50 days of free access) studies Hessenberg differential-algebraic equations (DAEs) of size ν with nonsmooth right-hand side functions. Well-posedness theory established in this article includes consistent initialization robust to parametric perturbations, and local existence and uniqueness of solutions in the classical senses. Regular…

A research project that aims to avoid CO2 emissions within hydrogen production, led by the MIT professors Asegun Henry (Mechanical Engineering) and Paul Barton (Chemical Engineering, PSEL), has been awarded $750,000 in funding by the Center for Carbon Capture, Utilization, and Storage, one of the MIT Energy Initiative’s Low-Carbon Energy Centers. The project, "Lower cost, CO2-free,…

Avinash Subramanian (currently a PhD student), Truls Gundersen, and Thomas Adams II (a PSEL alumni) have won the Processes 2020 Best Paper Award for their review paper "Modeling and Simulation of Energy Systems: A Review", which is available here. The award, sponsored by MDPI and the Processes Journal, has been granted to a total of 3 papers among those published…

We are pleased to announce that Dr. Kamil Khan, currently an Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering at McMaster University and previously a Ph.D. student at PSEL, has won the 2020 CAST W. David Smith Graduate Publication Award. The award, shared with Blake Rawlings, will be recognized at the CAST Award Banquet at the AIChE Meeting in…

The new Energy article Optimization of a Dual Mixed Refrigerant Process using a Nonsmooth Approach (click here for free access)  uses a nonsmooth flowsheeting methodology to create simulation and optimization models for dual mixed refrigerant processes. New improved operating conditions are obtained using the primal-dual interior-point optimizer IPOPT, with sensitivity information calculated using new developments in nonsmooth analysis to…

Caroline Nielsen, a current Ph.D. student at PSEL, has been selected to receive an AY19-20 MathWorks Engineering Fellowship. The fellowship supports graduate students in the School of Engineering that actively use MathWorks software, and is awarded in recognition of an outstanding academic record, exceptional background and a promising future.

Joseph K. Scott, a former Ph.D student at PSEL, will be joining the School of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering (ChBE) at Georgia Tech as an Associate Professor.