Research

Focus:

The development of separations technologies to meet current and future industrial needs

Overview:

The separations research effort can be divided into three groups: traditional technologies, novel technologies, and new applications of traditional technologies. Details of each area are given below.

• Traditional separations technologies - The fundamental understanding of widely practiced mass transfer processes such as distillation and extraction can be expanded through the development of mechanistic models. Research in this area addresses both mass transfer and hydraulic aspects of these technologies.
  
• Novel separations technologies- Traditional separations processes suffer from high energy consumption and high capital cost requirements. More selective separations technologies offer the potential to reduce these negative factors and produce more cost effective process designs.
  
• New applications of traditional separations technologies- As frontier areas such as biotechnology and microelectronics fabrication mature, separations issues will become increasingly important. The research effort is targeted at meeting challenges presented in these rapidly expanding areas by evaluating mature technologies for new applications.

Recently Completed Projects:

CFD Simulations of Structured Packing

Neutron Imaging of Structured Packing