Webinar: Computational Modelling of Fluidized Bed Process and Its Applications

Ray Cocco has been with PSRI for 15 years where he currently has the role of President and CEO. PSRI is a consortium-based company with 30 member companies headquartered in Canada, France, Finland, Germany, India, Japan, Saudi Arabia, UAE, UK and the United States.  Before PSRI, Ray spent 17 years with The Dow Chemical Company where he led research and development efforts in numerous particle technology platforms including the production of WoodStalkTM (a particleboard made of straw) for Dow BioProducts, the production of vinyl chloride monomer and RCl oxidation using fluidized beds, the production of hydrocarbon using circulating fluidized beds, the development of polyolefin catalyst for fluidized beds, and in the production of aluminum nitride and silicon carbide ceramic powders using moving bed reactors. Today, he is a advisory board member of the University of Florida Chemical Engineering Advisory Board, Auburn University Chemical Engineering Alumni Committee,  University College at London’s CNIE, and on the editorial boards for Powder and Bulk Engineering and Powder Technology. Ray was the past chair of the AIChE Particle Technology Forum (Group 3), past member of the AIChE Chemical Technology Operating Council (CTOC), and is currently an AIChE Fellow.  Ray is also the past chairman of the World Congress in Particle Technology VIII in April 2018. He has over 80 publications, three book chapters, several patents, numerous of invited presentations and consults for industry, national labs and universities on a regular basis.  Ray has a BS in ChE from University of Florida and a PhD in ChE from Auburn

Wyatt Casey LaMarche has been a Project Leader at PSRI since 2017.  During his PhD at the University of Florida and postdoctoral research at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Wyatt studied particle-particle and particle-gas interactions on the micro-scale (particle-level) for the development of advance computational fluid dynamics (CFD) models for predicting the macro-scale (system-level) behavior. His research spans from lunar soil ejection by subsonic jets to the influence of nanometer-scale surface roughness on particle cohesion and heat transfer. At PSRI, Wyatt is working on agglomeration and clustering effects on particle drag, using a wide range of tools such as two-fluid model-ing, reduced order modeling, discrete element method, and MP-PIC modeling.

Dr. K. Nandakumar is currently Gordon A and Mary Cain Chair Professor at Louisiana State University. Formerly he was in the Department of Chemical and Materials Engineering at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada for nearly 25 years. Dr. Nandakumar received his B. Tech from Madras University in 1973, M. Sc from the University of Saskatchewan in 1975 and his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1979.

After earning his BS degree in Chemical Engineering from Tehran Polytechnic in 1989, Reza had worked in different industries for several years including consulting firms, construction, sales and marketing.

He then moved to Chicago to pursue his PhD degree attending IIT where he showed interest in computational physics and mathematical modeling. Reza has been working at Honeywell/UOP since 2003 where he is responsible for CFD modeling and analysis of different refinery units with emphasis on multiphase flows. He has won the 2019 UOP technical leadership award. Reza has also taught transport phenomena as an adjunct professor at UIC in Chicago as well as general chemistry at Chicago city college.

During his years at IIT till now, Reza has presented his work at AIChE meetings and chemical engineering journals and has also reviewed papers for different journals and meetings. He has co-authored and presented more than 30 papers and in co-inventor of more than 30 US and non-US patents.

He is also a fellow of AIChE and active member of particle technology forum and Chicago local section. On the local level, Reza has served as the Chicago section chair and hold many other positions and has been involved in planning and executing the section’s Midwest regional conference for many years. Reza has served as the PTF vice chair for 2012-2014 and chair for 2015-2016 term. He was also a member of CEOC & SIOC and served as SIOC chair in 2016. He also has won the AIChE shining star award in 2019.

Dr. Shahnam joined Department of Energy National Energy Technology Laboratory in 2009.  He leads the application group in the Multiphase Flow Sciences (MFS) team at NETL. The MFS team is focused on supporting mission of DOE by developing physics-based modeling tools for accelerating the development of energy systems.  His team supports projects in CFD model development for biomass pyrolysis and gasification in fluidized and moving beds, uncertainty quantification and propagation in simulation of fluidized bed gasifiers, data driven high fidelity surrogate model development using AI/ML and CFD models for adsorption and desorption of oxygen from perovskite sorbent.  Prior to joining NETL, from 1999 to 2009, he was a senior consulting engineer at Fluent Inc. Power Generation Industry team (later ANSYS Inc.).

Dr. Sreekanth Pannala is a Research Fellow at SABIC from 2015. Sreekanth is a multidisciplinary technologist and computational scientist using advanced modeling to accelerate development of novel reactors and processes that are energy efficient, sustainable, and use alternative feedstock such as mixed plastic waste. Prior to this, he was a distinguished research staff member in the Computer Science and Mathematics Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. He received his B. Tech (1993) in Aerospace Engineering from IIT Kharagpur and M.S. (1994) and Ph.D. (2000) in Aerospace Engineering specializing in the area of computational combustion of two-phase flows from Georgia Tech. He received Federal Laboratory Technology Transfer award in 2006 and R&D 100 award in 2007 for his contribution to the development of MFIX (http://goo.gl/kOl30), an open-source multiphase reacting flows simulation suite. He has served as a principal investigator on various DOE computational science projects and has over 100 journal and conference publications in various areas of computational science and engineering. He also served as a lead editor for a book on computational gas-solids reacting flows (http://goo.gl/QwU32). He led the development of battery simulation software environment (http://vibe.ornl.gov). He was also awarded Secretary of Energy’s Achievement Award - highest non-monetary award from Department of Energy.

Alberto Passalacqua is associate professor of Mechanical Engineering at Iowa State University, with a courtesy appointment in Chemical and Biological Engineering. He associate director of the Center for Multiphase Flow Research and Education (CoMFRE) at Iowa State University, and the lead developer of OpenQBMM, the first open-source implementation of quadrature-based moment methods into OpenFOAM®. He received the American Chemical Society – Petroleum Research Fund Doctoral New Investigator award in 2014. He was the recipient of the Jean d’Alembert junior research fellowship at Université Paris-Saclay (France) in Summer 2017 and 2018. His research, funded by the US National Science Foundation and by the US Department of Energy, focuses on the development, implementation and validation of meso- and macro-scale computational models for reacting multiphase flows and of the numerical methods required to reliably solve them, including aspects of uncertainty quantification.

Kuochen has spent 14 years with Shell as a SME in CFD modeling. Before joining Shell, he worked for the Dow Chemical Company at Freeport for 9 years in Engineering Sciences. His current interests are in multiphase flows, biomass processing, erosion, flow assisted corrosion and data sciences. Kuochen has a Ph.D in mechanical engineering from SUNY Stony Brook.