Dr. Rafiqul Gani, acclaimed for his extensive research in computer-aided methods and tools for sustainable products and processes in chemical engineering, delivered the J.D. Lindsay Lecture at the Artie McFerrin Department of Chemical Engineering at Texas A&M University. He is a professor of systems design at the Department of Chemical & Biochemical Engineering at The Technical University of Denmark and the former head and co-founder of the Computer Aided Process Engineering Center (CAPEC).
Gani's lecture, “New Vistas in Chemical Product and Process Design,” referenced design of chemicals-based products that were broadly classified process centric and product centric. He pointed out that everything around us has chemical-based aspects and described several sustainability issues related to integrated product-process design, the modeling challenges related to product properties and functions and the motivation to find novel, innovative and sustainable solutions.
Gani's current research interests include development of computer aided methods and tools for modeling, property estimation, process-product synthesis and design and process-tools integration.
“While significant advances have been
made in the development of systematic model-based techniques for process design and also for optimization, operation and control, much work is needed to reach the same level for product design,” said Gani.
Gani is the former editor-in-chief of the Computers and Chemical Engineering journal, editor for the Elsevier CACE book series and serves on the editorial advisory board of the Journal of Process Systems Engineering and Current Opinion in Chemical Engineering. He was awarded three Doctor Honoris Causa degrees from University Politehnica Bucharest, University of Pannonia and Babes-Bolyai University. He is also the president of the European Federation of Chemical Engineering (EFCE), elected for a second term 2016-2018; a Fellow of the AIChE and also a Fellow of IChemE. He was awarded the AIChE (CAST Division) Computers in Chemical Engineering 2015 award in November 2015. Currently he leads a special project called SPEED (Sustainable Product Process Engineering, Evaluation and Design) with three post-docs, 10 Ph.D. students, four master’s students and six visiting students.
The J.D. Lindsay Lecture Series enables outstanding speakers from industry and academia to visit Texas A&M and the Department of Chemical Engineering to exchange ideas on teaching and research with students and faculty.