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Special Seminar: Dr. Rafiqul Gani

The Texas A&M Energy Institute will host a special seminar featuring Dr. Rafiqul Gani, a Co-Founder of the PSE for SPEED Company, on Tuesday, March 28, 2023, from 4:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m. CDT (UTC -5:00) in the Jack E. Brown Chemical Engineering Building room 112. The topic will be “Chemical Products for a Changed World from a PSE Perspective.”

Biography

Dr. Rafiqul Gani retired at the end of 2017 as professor of systems design at the Department of Chemical & Biochemical Engineering, The Technical University of Denmark and the former head and co-founder of the Computer Aided Process Engineering Center (CAPEC). He has published 529 peer-reviewed journal-proceedings articles plus book chapters and delivered over 350 lectures, seminars and plenary/keynote lectures at international conferences, institutions and companies all over the world.

Professor Gani is the former editor-in-chief of the Computers and Chemical Engineering journal (2009-2015), editor for the Elsevier CACE book series, editor for the Sustainable Production and Consumption journal, and serves in the editorial advisory boards of the journals: Computers and Chemical Engineering and Current Opinion in Chemical Engineering.

Professor Gani has been awarded three Doctor Honoris Causa degrees from University Politehnica Bucharest, University of Pannonia and Babes-Bolyai University. Professor Gani is the ex-president of the EFCE (European Federation of Chemical Engineering), serving two terms 2014-2016 and 2016-2018; a member of the Danish Academy of Science; a Fellow of the AIChE and a Fellow of IChemE. He received the AIChE Computers in Chemical Engineering award in 2015, the EFCE Jacques Villermaux Medal in 2019, the AIChE Sustainability Engineering Forum award in 2020 and is the winner of the IChemE Sargent Medal in 2021. In 2018, Prof Gani co-founded the PSE for SPEED Company, that develops, implements and employs state of the art PSE methods and tools to solve a wide range of problems of industrial and research significance, reliably, efficiently and very rapidly. Prof Gani’s current research interests continue with the development and application of computer aided methods and tools for modelling; property estimation; process-product synthesis, design & intensification; and process-tools integration with emphasis on energy, sustainability and application of a systems.

Abstract

Chemicals, in some form, can be found in all aspects of our daily life because we depend on chemicals-based products for our survival on earth. Regardless of geographical location, society needs to use a variety of products that are directly or indirectly connected to chemicals. We design and operate manufacturing processes for single species products like bulk-chemicals, specialty chemicals, and many more for Business to Business (B2B) options, which we then use to design and operate manufacturing processes for chemicals-based products (single species, blends, formulations, etc.) to staisfy our daily needs for Business to Consumer (B2C) options. An important issue is what to make, both for B2B and B2C, before we decide on how to make. The former is related to product design, while the later is related to process design (Gani and Ng, 2015, Zhang et al., 2020). Both are related to product and/or process development. As the number of chemicals being used and their applications in processes and/or products grow, their implications on human health and environment as well as the economy need to be understood and analysed (Syeda et al., 2021; Syeda et al., 2022).

The issue of what to make is also closely related to why to make, because as we know, only a small percentage of chemical product ideas or concepts actually end-up being produced for B2C options. Therefore, it is important to make the right decisions related to what and why to make as early as possible so that the product development time and costs can be reduced. The current challenges that we are facing related to energy-water-food-health-environment and together with the pendemic due to COVID-19 have changed many of the factors influencing our decision making related to chemicals based product design and development. Factors such as recycle, re-use, replace need to be considered together with requirements of sustainable development (Gani et al., 2022). A closer look at the chemicals we use in our products is also necessary. For example, while some chemicals have no safety, health or environmental issues, others have issues that are well-documented and are usually monitored and controlled. Yet, there are others for which we have little information and could potentially be very dangerous, unless their uses are strctly monitored. It is necessary to identify the likely problems from uses of these dangerous chemicals and take necessary steps to prevent future problems, rather than cure them later. These are difficult, multi-disciplinary problems where Process Systems Engineering can play an important role to manage the complexity (Pistikopoulos et al., 2021). 

The goal of this presentation is to give an overview of some of the issues that need to be considered in chemicals-based product design and development and how advances in methods and computer-aided tools from the PSE community can contribute to help tackle them efficiently and reliably. It is necessary to look beyond the process simulators as we know them. What about a chemicals-based product simulator? What about integration of B2B and B2C options as in simultaneous design of catalysts, solvent, adsorbents together with processes to manufacture them as well as processes that use them for B2C options? A general framework for tackling chemicals-based product design and development problem is necessary together with associated methods and tools that could be used in different work-flows within the framework. Pesrspectives on interesting new developments in the area of chemicals-based products related to PSE methods and computer-aided tools will be highlighted. 

References

Gani, R., Ng ,K.M., 2015, roduct design – Molecules, devices, functional products, and formulated products,  Computers & Chemical Engineering, 81, 70-79

Gani, R., Chen, X., Eden, M.R., Mansouri, S.S., Martin, M., Mujtaba, I.M., Padungwatanaroj, O.,  Roh, K., Ricardez-Sandoval, L., Sugiyama, H., Zhao, J., Zondervan, E., 2022, Challenges and Opportunities for Process Systems Engineering in a Changed World, Computer Aided Chemical Engineering, 49, 7-20

Pistikopoulos, E.N., Barbosa-Povoa, A., Lee, J.H., Misener, R., Mitsos, A., Reklaitis, G.V., Venkatasubramanian, V., You, F., Gani, R., 2021. Process systems engineering – The generation next? Computers & Chemical Engineering, 147, 107252. 

Syeda, S.R., Khan, E.A.. Padungwatanaroj, O., Kuprasertwong, N., Tula, A.K, 2022, A perspective on hazardous chemical substitution in consumer products, Current Opinion in Chemical Engineering, 36, 100748.

Syeda, S.R., Khan, E.A.. Padungwatanaroj, O., Kuprasertwong, N., Gani, R., 2022, A Model-Data Driven Chemical Analysis System for Products and Associated Processes, Computer Aided Chemical Engineering, 49, 181-186.

Zhang, L., Mao, H., Liu, Q., Gani, R., 2020, Chemical product design–recent advances and perspectives, Current Opinion in Chemical Engineering, 27, 22-34