Editorial pubs.acs.org/IECR
Preface: Doraiswami Ramkrishna—Dedicated to the Application and Teaching of Mathematics in Chemical Engineering
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At IIT Kanpur, Ramki was involved in teaching transport to large undergraduate classes of students from all disciplines of engineering. He proudly recalls numerous students of extraordinary caliber such as Rakesh Agrawal, Rakesh Jain, and Santosh Gupta who have become academic leaders. He also taught unit operations, and a bioelective to seniors and graduate students; he developed graduate courses in chemical reactor analysis and applied mathematics. These early years saw him developing his academic contributions in different directions. Mathematics was indeed the underlying base of all his activity. He rates highly his collaboration with Jay Borwanker (mathematical statistician) as it led to major developments in the application of stochastic processes in chemical engineering. They were the first to develop (with an electrical engineering student N. J. Rao) a numerical algorithm to solve nonlinear stochastic differential equations which was published in SIAM Journal on Control (1974); it was followed up with applications to chemical and biochemical reactors (CES, 1974; AIChE Jl., 1977). With B. H. Shah (Ph.D., 1974), they established an exact method of simulating particulate systems based on the concept of interval of quiescence that was published in AIChE Jl in 1977. While this publication has well over 100 citations, an identical algorithm published independently in 1977 by Gillespie in the Chemistry literature has nearly 6000 citations! Ramkrishna’s research group was among the earliest to show the formulation of population balance equations and the rationale for the selection of internal coordinates for modeling transport in an evolving dispersed phase system. He further showed how integro-partial differential equations of population balance equations can be solved using the method of weighted residuals, thus promoting the growth of population balance models. Although his stress was on theory, many of his students (Narsimhan, Wright, Sathyagal) did experiments particularly toward confirming
rofessor Doraiswami (Ramki) Ramkrishna was born on October 29, 1938, in Trichur, India. He attended Ramnarain Ruia college for his Intermediate Science, and subsequently obtained his Bachelor’s degree in Chemical Engineering in 1960 from the Bombay University Department of Chemical Technology, now known as the Institute of Chemical Technology (ICT). The same year, he attended graduate school at the University of Minnesota, where he worked under the direction of Arnold Fredrickson and Henry Tsuchiya for his doctoral degree which he received in early 1965. While still a graduate student in the Department of Chemical Engineering, he was appointed an Instructor by Neal Amundson. Thereafter he served for two years as an Assistant Professor in the department before returning to India in 1967 to join the Indian Institute of Technology at Kanpur as an Assistant Professor. Interested in mathematics even from his days in junior college, Minnesota was just the place for him to do his graduate work where he was profoundly influenced by Neal Amundson, Rutherford Aris, Arnie Fredrickson, and Skip Scriven. Not surprisingly, he dedicated himself to the development of mathematical applications in chemical and biological engineering for his academic research. His doctoral thesis explored the formulation of kinetic models to biochemical reactors and pioneered the concept of structured models by introducing chemical structure in biomass. After obtaining his doctorate, he collaborated with Arnie Fredrickson and Henry Tsuchiya for the first development of general population balance models for microbial cells. During the two years of his Assistant Professorship at Minnesota, he also collaborated with Amundson who suggested a serious study of Hilbert space and linear operators. Ramki sat in on advanced courses from the Minnesota Math Department and developed his mathematical interest in various directions. He was also influenced greatly by his eminent colleague, classmate, and good friend George Gavalas who joined Caltech upon receiving his Ph.D. in 1964. As was usual practice at Minnesota to have Assistant Professors start with teaching recitations of undergraduate courses, Ramki began similarly but soon sought and secured leadership in a transport course. © 2015 American Chemical Society
Special Issue: Doraiswami Ramkrishna Festschrift Published: October 28, 2015 10135
DOI: 10.1021/acs.iecr.5b03823 Ind. Eng. Chem. Res. 2015, 54, 10135−10137
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perspective of linear operators in Volume 3 of Advances in Transport Processes. Subsequently, Ramkrishna and Amundson exchanged several trips to each other’s homes to discuss the contents of their book which was published in 1985. Ramkrishna spent 7 years at IIT Kanpur during which he supervised five Ph.D. and several M.Tech students. Professor A. P. Kudchadker, an eminent Chemical Engineering educator and colleague of Ramki at IIT Kanpur, observes, “During a visit by top managers of a reputed multi-national company (in the early 1970s), Ramki and I had discussions with them regarding the increasing role of computers in chemical engineering education and overall in the profession and that our IITK students had access and benefit of a mainframe computer (DEC 10), and hence were better than others. The top managers vehemently stated that this was not desirable, a bad idea, and that computers would not play any significant role in chemical engineering. The discussions quickly turned into heated arguments. We were giving wrong education to the students, they said! They couldn’t be proved more wrong, further highlighting the department’s forward thinking vision.” In 1974, Ramkrishna returned to the US as a Visiting Associate Professor at the University of Wisconsin for a year followed by a year’s visit to the University of Minnesota as a Visiting Professor from 1975 to 1976. These visiting appointments were significant in his career as they preceded his joining Purdue as Professor in August 1976. Ramkrishna frequently and proudly recalls the linear operator course he taught at Minnesota in the Winter quarter of 1976 with Manfred Morari as his TA and a class studded with many of today’s academic leaders such as Doug Lauffenburger, Greg and Maria Stephanopoulos, Zygourakis, Talmon, and many others. Ramkrishna’s arrival at Purdue marked his reentry into biological engineering research because of his association with George Tsao. He founded the cybernetic modeling framework with a series of students who did both experiment and theory over three decades to establish it as a leading dynamic methodology for modeling metabolism and metabolic engineering. More recently, Ramkrishna’s activity in biology has expanded to the field of personalized medicine in collaboration with clinical researchers. For his contributions to Applied Mathematics, the AIChE awarded Ramkrishna the Alpha Chi Sigma Award in 1987. For contributions to dispersed phase and bioreactor engineering, he received the AIChE Wilhelm Award in 1998. He was awarded the Senior Humboldt Award in 2001 by Germany. In 2004, he won the Thomas Baron Award for modeling contributions to particulate systems. Recognition by his alma mater include the UDCT Diamond Award in 1994 and the Platinum Award in 2009 by University of Bombay, the Jewel of Ruia Award by his junior college in 2006, and an Honorary Doctor of Science by the University of Minnesota in 2004. He was elected Fellow of AIMBE in 1996, Honorary Fellow of IIChE in 2001, and Fellow of AIChE in 2008. He was elected to the United States National Academy of Engineering in 2009 and as a foreign Fellow of the Indian National Academy of Engineering in 2011. Ramkrishna was appointed H. C. Peffer Distinguished Professor at Purdue University in 1994. Over his career, he has held many distinguished visiting appointments. He was Kane Professor (Bombay University) in 1983, G. T. Piercy Distinguished Professor in 1988 (Minnesota), Melchor Visiting Professor in 1994 (Notre Dame), Dow-Sharma Fellow in 1999, and Sharma Distinguished Professor in 2010. He has delivered several Distinguished Lectures in the U.S. and abroad. These include Kuloor Memorial Lectures (1982), Distinguished
predictions of behavior from theory. Thus, they validated selfsimilar distributions of liquid drops in stirred liquid−liquid dispersions during breakage or coalescence that were predicted from theory. Further, the solution of inverse problems for such scaling populations was shown to yield breakage and coalescence frequencies. Another notable feature of his research in the 1970s is a series of papers with Borwanker on the statistical foundation of population balance equations, paving the way for stochastic modeling of randomly behaving small populations that has now become important in applications to sterilization processes, cancer modeling, and numerous particulate processes in confined systems. Ramkrishna steadily contributed to the development of population balances with numerous invited reviews on the subject. His 1978 article in the winter edition of Chemical Engineering Education expounded the importance of population balances for chemical engineers. In 1979, he published an article in Advances in Biochemical Engineering (Vol. 11) demonstrating how deterministic and stochastic population balances are essential tools for modeling microbial populations. His publication in 1985, in Reviews in Chemical Engineering, discussed various new perspectives of population balance models. He was invited again in 2002 to contribute a flagship paper in Chemical Engineering Science on the subject. He is an active participant of conferences on population balance modeling which occur every three years. A special issue of Chemical Engineering Science on Population Balance modeling in 2009 was dedicated to honor Ramkrishna’s leadership in the area. His book Population Balances. Theory & Applications to Pariculate Systems in Engineering, published by Academic Press in 2000, enjoys considerable popularity with nearly 1200 citations to date. This book contains several features of population balances yet to become common knowledge to population balance modelers. Thus, the formulation of problems in which particle internal coordinates satisfy stochastic differential equations is one such aspect that has come to be of significance to biological signaling processes as shown by Shu et al. [Chem. Eng. Sci., 70, 188−199, 2012]. These and several other new applications of population balances are covered in a recent invited review in Annual Reviews of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering (2014). Ramkrishna’s development and teaching of linear operator applications began at IIT Kanpur on his arrival there in 1967. He carried the first version of his typed class notes on a three week trip to Minnesota in 1972 for discussions with Neal Amundson, which led to their decision to publish a book together on the subject. In 1979, Ramkrishna published in Chemical Engineering Education an article on what the subject of functional analysis could do for chemical engineers. Ramkrishna and Amundson published many papers together that showed how the language of linear operators enabled the efficient solution of a wide variety of new problems in transport and chemical reaction engineering. Heat and mass transfer problems with peripheral transport to flowing fluids led to oblique and mixed derivative boundary conditions previously unfamiliar to chemical engineers that Ramkrishna and Amundson solved in a series of papers in Chemical Engineering Science and elsewhere. The methodology, which depended on a curious formulation of Hilbert Space and the operator, became also applicable for the solution of the Graetz problem extended to include axial transport in Papoutsakis’ doctoral effort published in a series of papers by Papoutsakis, Ramkrishna, and Lim, which continue to be actively cited. Before publication of his book with Neal Amundson, Ramkrishna published in 1983 an invited 10136
DOI: 10.1021/acs.iecr.5b03823 Ind. Eng. Chem. Res. 2015, 54, 10135−10137
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Lecturer at State University of NJ at Rutgers (1998), Kamath Memorial Lecture (Chemcon 2001) in Chennai, the Fredrickson Lecture (2004) at Minnesota, L. K. Doraiswamy Lecture at ISU (2014), and National Chemical Laboratory, Pune (2014). Ramkrishna was the first Chair of AIChE CAST area 10D for Applied Mathematics, a position he held for 4 years. He is on the editorial board of Current Opinion in Chemical Engineering, Processes, International Journal of Engineering Research, and World Journal of Chemical Engineering. Along with Professor P. B. Deshpande, Ramki organized in 1988 an International Conference on Chemical Engineering Education in Bangalore, India, to discuss curricular changes with several distinguished educators from the U.S. and India. He was also the U.S. Representative of the first U.S.−India Conference in Chemical Engineering held in Mumbai in 2004. Ramkrishna has provided outstanding selfless service at Purdue. He served for a long time as Chair of the School’s Graduate Committee and of the Awards committee. He chaired the ChE Head Search committee in 2003 and served as Associate Head for three years during 2004−06. In recent years, for the College of Engineering, he chaired the Dean’s Faculty Advisory Committee and also the Awards Committee. In addition, he has been a longtime member of the College Strategic Oversight Committee for hiring new faculty and numerous Distinguished Professor Committees. Ramki and his wife Geetha have two sons, both educated at Purdue. Sriram has a Master’s degree in Computer Science and works with Intel in Portland, OR, while Arvind has a double BS in Industrial Design and Interdisciplinary Engineering and works at Johnson Control in Canton, MI. Sriram is married to Banu, a practicing dentist, and Arvind’s wife Usha is a Biomedical Engineer with a Master’s degree from the University of Michigan. Arvind and Usha have two sons, Rohan and Neal. Ramkrishna has trained over 40 Ph.D. students, of whom close to 40% are teaching in academic institutions while others are enjoying productive careers in industry. His legacy as a preeminent ChE educator and researcher continues with the work of his former students. We thank Professor Ramkrishna’s many professional colleagues from various institutions around the world for contributing to this Festschrift in his honor.
Arvind Varma School of Chemical Engineering, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, United States
Ganapati D. Yadav
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Institute of Chemical Technology, Mumbai, India
AUTHOR INFORMATION
Notes
Views expressed in this editorial are those of the authors and not necessarily the views of the ACS. The authors declare no competing financial interest. Editor's Note
The Commentary article, “Chemical Engineering Principles in the Field of Cell Mechanics”, by Richard B. Dickinson and Tanmay P. Lele (DOI:10.1021/acs.iecr.5b01330), was intended for inclusion in this Festschrift special issue. Due to a production error, this paper was published earlier this year in Vol. 54, Issue 23, pp 6061−6066.
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DOI: 10.1021/acs.iecr.5b03823 Ind. Eng. Chem. Res. 2015, 54, 10135−10137
