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Dimitri Gidaspow: Pioneering Contributor to Computational Gas-Particle Flow and Fluidization Professor Dimitri Gidaspow’s pioneering research, starting in the 1970s, has created a widely used capability for solving practical problems that are related to industrial fluidized-bed reactors with the help of fundamental multiphase flow equations. What was mainly an academic pursuit in the 1980s is now available in commercial computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software that is routinely used today by many industries. Dimitri has been a major contributor to the development of constitutive relations employed in these software products to describe gas-particle flow, such as those for drag and solids stress. His work on multiphase flow and fluidization is cited (and continues to be cited) in numerous publications on the formulation of constitutive relations, numerical simulations, experimental investigations, validation studies, and applications to industrial problems. His 1994 textbook, Multiphase Flow and Fluidization Continuum and Kinetic Theory Descriptions, published by Academic Press, is widely used by students and industrial practitioners all over the world. Multiphase flow has been a difficult subject and continues to remain so. Dimitri has played a major role in the modeling, computation, and validation of very difficult fluid-particle flows, and in training and inspiring many researchers from around the world. Along the way, he has also made fundamental contributions in the areas of fuel cells, nuclear reactor safety, coal gasification, solar energy,
electrofiltration of solvent refined coal, and nanotechnology. This special issue honors Professor Dimitri Gidaspow, who turned 75 in 2009. Professor Gidaspow was born in Kobeliaki, Ukraine in 1934. His parents had degrees in agriculture and worked in an experimental station called Veseliy Podol, which was located in the country and run from Kiev, Ukraine. His mother received a medal from Nikita Krushchev for her joint discovery of DDT, which was developed for killing insects that destroy sugar beet plants. After the end of World War II, Dimitri went to the Gymnasium in Heidelberg, Germany. He and his parents emigrated from Germany to the United States in 1949. He received his B.Ch.E. degree from the City College of New York in 1956 and his M.Ch.E. degree from the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn in 1960, which was the year that he married his childhood sweetheart from the Ukraine, Helen. He earned his Ph.D. degree from the Gas Technology Department at Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) in 1962. Immediately after receiving his Ph.D., Dimitri was offered a teaching position by his former advisor Ralph Peck, then Chair of the Chemical Engineering Department at IIT. Dimitri accepted the offer, expecting to spend, at most, one year in Chicago, which happily became an unfulfilled expectation for his numerous students over the next five decades, including the
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first two authors of this preface. Dimitri taught the graduate heat-transfer and undergraduate thermodynamics courses. Through his first Ph.D. student and friend Charles W. Solbrig, Dimitri became a consultant to the Atomic Energy Commission from 1972 to 1974 at what was then called the National Reactor Testing Station (NRTS) (this facility is now called Idaho National Laboratory). The NRTS was the Atomic Energy Commission’s (AEC) site in Idaho Falls, ID, where research was being conducted on nuclear reactor safety. Charlie’s section at NRTS had been working on modeling the hypothetical loss of coolant accident (LOCA). He proposed a new theory of twophase flow to simulate the LOCA and asked Dimitri for help, sparking Dimitri’s interest in computational multiphase flow. Later, Dimitri applied this knowledge to solve problems in gas-particle fluidization, working for the Institute of Gas Technology (IGT), where fluidized-bed processes for making gas from coalsa process that is notoriously difficult to scale upswere being developed. In the late 1970s, Dimitri’s research group at IIT was one of only three in the world to develop physics-based computational models of fluidized beds. Dimitri’s sustained work on this subject during the next four decades has played a pivotal role in taking such models from academic papers to industrial applications. In the early 1970s, Dimitri pioneered organizing the first venues to discuss problems arising in the fledgling field of twophase flow, such as formulation of the field equations and scaleup of coal conversion processes. The first of these was the Round Table Discussion, “Modeling of Two Phase Flow”, held in 1974 at the Fifth International Heat Transfer Conference in Tokyo, Japan and the second of these was the “NSF Workshop on Mathematical Modeling”, held in 1976 at the Two-Phase Flow and Heat Transfer Symposium-Workshop in Fort Lauderdale, FL. In late 1970s, after joining IIT’s Department of Chemical Engineering, Darsh Wasan and Dimitri Gidaspow began a highly productive collaboration, which led to, among other things, the invention of two practical devices based on electrokinetic phenomenasa cross-flow electrofilter and a lamella electrosettler to separate carbonaceous particles from nonaqueous media. Dimitri and Darsh shared the 1986 NSF Creativity Award for this work. Dimitri received the Donald Q. Kern award, and delivered the Kern Award Lecture at the 23rd National Heat Transfer Conference in Denver, CO in 1985. The citation for the award read “for research in energy conversion; fuel cells, and air conditioning”. That last part of the citation might sound a little offbeat, but it is testament to Dimitri’s creativity in wide range of topics. Dimitri and Professor Zalman Lavan of the Mechanical Engineering Department at IIT developedsand builtsa fullscale, computer-controlled, desiccant-cooled, solar-regenerated, air conditioning facility on the IIT campus. Clearly, these two were thinking “Green Energy” decades before it became fashionable. Dimitri’s award lecture, titled ”Hydrodynamics of
Fluidization and Heat Transfer: Supercomputer Modeling”, reviewing the state-of-the-art in computational modeling of fluidization, was published in Applied Mechanics ReViews in 1986. He then embarked on writing his first book, in which he reviewed progress in computer modeling of fluidization up to the early 1990s and developed and applied the Kinetic Theory of Granular Flow. Dimitri’s second book, Computational Techniques: The Multiphase CFD Approach to Fluidization and Green Energy Technologies, co-authored with his former Ph.D. student, Veeraya Jiradilok, was published by Nova Science Publishers in 2009, together with a CD ROM that contained the IIT computer programs and examples. Dimitri has been the principal advisor to over 50 IIT Ph.D. students, many Masters’ students, and over a dozen Ph.D. students earning their degrees in foreign universities (in Norway, Thailand, Korea, and China). Three of his former students have become Engineering Deans, two have won the Ernst W. Thiele Award, and one has won the Donald Q. Kern Award. He has over 200 publications and a dozen patents. In 2000, he became a Distinguished University Professor, the highest recognition given by IIT to a faculty member. His contributions have been recognized through the Flour-Daniel Lectureship Award in Fluidization by the Particle Technology Division of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) (2002), the IIT/ Sigma Xi Research Award (2005), the Ernst W. Thiele Award from the AIChE Chicago Section (2005), and the AIChE Thomas Baron Award (2006). Dimitri is a Fellow of the AIChE and a 50-year Member. He has been very active in the AIChE, serving as organizer and chair of numerous sessions over the years, and in the Particle Technology Forum at AIChE annual meetings. Dimitri and his wife Helen have one son, Michael (“Mischa”) (born in 1977) and one grandson, Alexander (born in 2009). In 2010, Dimitri and Helen will celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary. Congratulations!
Dr. Robert W. Lyczkowski Argonne National Laboratory, Argonne, Illinois 60439
Dr. Madhava Syamlal National Energy Technology Laboratory, Morgantown, West Virginia 26507
Professor Sankaran Sundaresan Princeton UniVersity, Princeton, New Jersey 08544 (E-mail:
[email protected]) IE100335W
