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| Bird/Stewart/Lightfoot Programs | |
| Bird/Stewart/Lightfoot Lecture 2006-2007 |
Lecture by Darsh T. Wasan
Department of Chemical and Environmental Engineering, Illinois Institute of Technology
Tuesday, April 17, 2007
Room 1800 Engineering Hall
Refreshments at 3:45 p.m.
Lecture at 4:00 p.m.
Dispersion science holds the key to cost-effective manufacturing of an unimaginably large number of chemicals and consumer products. The control of industrial processes varying from sedimentation, flocculation, and coagulation to the manufacture of advanced self-assembled materials can be greatly improved by a better understanding of the interaction forces between particles and the confining geometries that affect the quality and stability of colloidal dispersions. This is especially the case in a concentrated colloidal dispersion where particles are more likely to come in close contact with one another and become more ordered in the confines of their restricted environment. In recent years, due to the advent of new instrumentation for measuring interaction forces in fluid-particle systems, novel forces, such as the structural force arising from the energy barrier caused by particle microstructuring, and the attractive depletion force caused by the excluded volume effect, have been characterized. This lecture will highlight the role of structural forces in stabilizing dispersions and especially point out their importance in a variety of technological contexts such as particle sedimentation, wetting, spreading and adhesion of such systems on solid surfaces. Theoretical results based on Monte Carlo simulations and integral equations of statistical mechanics are compared with the experimental data.
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Darsh T. Wasan is the Motorola Chair Professor of Chemical Engineering and Vice President for International Affairs at Illinois Institute of Technology. He received his B.S. degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. He has spent his entire professional career at IIT, and has held a variety of academic and administrative posts, including chemical engineering department chairman, interim dean of engineering, vice president for research and technology, and vice president for academic affairs and provost. He has been elected to membership in the U.S. National Academy of Engineering and as a Foreign Fellow of the Indian National Academy of Engineering. His many honors include the American Institute of Chemical Engineers Alpha Chi Sigma Award for Chemical Engineering Research, the American Chemical Society National Award in Colloid and Surface Chemistry, the American Society for Engineering Education Chemical Engineering Lectureship Award, and several endowed lectureships. His current research in the area of dispersion science and engineering includes foams, emulsions and particle dispersions, wetting and spreading of nanofluids on solid surfaces, detergency, and interfacial rheology. He is editor-in-chief of the Journal of Colloid and Interface Science.
As the chemical engineering profession developed in the first half of the 20th century, the concept of "unit operations" arose as the natural organizing principle in educating chemical engineers. Particularly in undergraduate education, underlying theories of mass, momentum and energy transfer were presented only to the extent necessary for a narrow range of applications. Following World War II, chemical engineers moved into a number of new areas in which problem definitions and solutions required a deeper knowledge of the fundamentals of transport phenomena than those provided in the textbooks on unit operations.
In the 1950's, R. Byron Bird, Warren E. Stewart, and Edwin N. Lightfoot stepped forward to develop an undergraduate course at the University of Wisconsin to integrate the teaching of fluid flow, heat transfer, and diffusion. From this beginning, they prepared the landmark textbook, Transport Phenomena, published in 1960 by John Wiley & Sons.
This textbook, referred to by generations of chemical engineers simply as BSL after its authors, would remain in print for 41 years and see five translations. BSL changed fundamentally the organizing principle in chemical engineering curricula worldwide. The enduring strength of BSL is testimony to the vision and attention to detail of its authors.
In "retirement," the three authors found time to thoroughly revise BSL, the second edition of which appeared in the summer of 2001. With new or revised discussions of such topics as two-phase systems, angular momentum, Taylor dispersion and turbulence, the revision promises to help prepare students well into the 21st century. The BSL Lecture was inaugurated in the fall of 2001 to honor the achievements of these outstanding chemical engineers.
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Copyright 2007 The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System Date last modified: 02-May-2007 Date created: 13-Mar-2007 Content by: che@che.wisc.edu Accessibility Web services Thank you for visiting http://www.engr.wisc.edu/che/bsl2006-2007.html |