Event
CHBE Seminar: Dr. William Hartt, UDEL
Friday, March 29, 2024
11:00 a.m.
Room 2108 Chemical and Nuclear Engineering Building
Patricia Lorenzana
301-405-1935
plorenza@umd.edu
Designing processes for shear-sensitive fluids
Abstract: Economic trends and environmental conditions are driving chemical products and processes towards sustainability. This transition involves changes in raw materials, supply chains, process synthesis, scale-up, and equipment cleaning. These trends and conditions are common themes that drive chemical product formulation and manufacturing towards more concentrated ingredients and intermediates, resulting in complex fluids. Concentrated surfactant solutions, emulsions, suspensions, and polymer solutions create challenges for process scale-up, manufacturing, and transport of these complex fluids. Shear-sensitive fluids are complex fluids with delicate microstructures that may be permanently changed when pumped or processed during manufacturing. To design a process, the kinetics of degradation of shear-sensitive fluids must be measured and modeling under realistic conditions. Measuring and modeling rheological properties that are rapidly changing at high strain rates is a new area for both experiments and simulations. Designing process equipment for these fluids from first principles is also new area. We present examples of shear-sensitive complex fluids and associated processing equipment challenges. Integration of laboratory data, rheological models, fluid flow simulation, and data driven models provide a rich environment for solving these challenges.
Bio: William Hartt is a Professor of Practice in the Department of Chemical and Biochemical Engineering at the University of Delaware. He spent thirty years in industry dealing with complex fluids, mostly at the Procter & Gamble Company. Will received his Ph.D. and B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Virginia Tech. He is a Fellow of the Society of Rheology. He is now working on novel rheometers with students, teaching applied rheology, teaching senior design, and attempting to bring CFD into the chemical engineering experience (in addition to fly-fishing).
