Abstract:
Chemical reaction in convective diffusion flow fields is a common setting for problems in Chemical Engineering. The convective diffusion operator for non-uniform flow fields is generally non-self-adjoint. However, by a suitable choice of Hilbert Space and inner product, the governing operator can be shown to be self-adjoint whose spectral resolution can be used to construct solutions to many problems of engineering interest.
Speaker Bio:
Prof. Ramkrishna — known to colleagues in the community as Ramki — is the Henry Creighton Peffer Distinguished Professor of Chemical Engineering at Purdue University. He earned his Bachelor's of Chemical Engg. at Institute of Chemical Technology, Univ. of Bombay and his PhD from the University of Minnesota, USA. He returned to India to join the faculty at IIT Kanpur, before joining the Purdue faculty in 1976. Professor Ramkrishna’s research group is motivated by ideas in the application of mathematics to solving problems in chemical and biochemical reaction engineering. Their research ideas arise from linear (operator methods) and nonlinear analysis of ordinary and partial differential equations, stochastic processes, and population balance modeling involving integro-partial differential equations. He has pioneered the framework of population balance equations describing various particulate processes and has also developed the cybernetic approach for dynamic description of metabolic processes.
Among his numerous awards, recently he has been the recipient of the 2021 William H. Walker Award of American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE), which was given “for original and seminal contributions to the chemical engineering literature on the application of mathematics to chemical, particulate, and biological processes.” He is a Fellow of AIChE and the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering and has been elected to both the U.S. and Indian National Academies of Engineering.