Members

Faculty

Professor Rakesh Agrawal joined Purdue University after 24 years at Air Products and Chemicals and is the Winthrop E. Stone Distinguished Professor of Chemical Engineering, Purdue University. He has extensive experience in process development. His current interest is in identifying sustainable energy pathways and making separation processes more energy efficient. Professor Agrawal was awarded the 2011 National Medal of Technology and Innovation for his work in improving the energy efficiency and reducing the cost of gas liquefaction and separation.

Prof. Mohit Tawarmalani

Professor Mohit Tawarmalani is a professor in the Krannert School of Management, who joined Purdue in 2001. Prof. Tawarmalani is one of the co-authors of BARON, an MINLP solver that incorporates domain reduction schemes with automatic reformulation strategies in order to locate the global optimum for the given problem.

Prof. Gintaras Reklaitis

Prof. Gintaras Reklaitis joined Purdue University in 1970 and is the Edward W. Comings Distinguished Professor of Chemical Engineering, Purdue University and also the Deputy Director of the ERC-SOPS. He has extensive experience in developing optimal operating strategies for batch and continuous separation schemes.

Graduate Students

Gautham M. Ramapriya

Gautham Ramapriya joined the group as a graduate student in Fall 2011. His research focuses on optimization of distillation configurations with less than n-1 distillation columns for an n-component mixture. Recently, he has also been working on developing new dividing wall columns for energy-efficient multicomponent distillation.

Zheyu Jiang

Zheyu Jiang joined the group as a graduate student in Fall 2014. His current research focuses on optimization of distillation configurations with n-1 columns for an n-component mixture. He obtained his BS in Chemical Engineering with distinction from the University of Minnesota in Spring 2014. Before joining Purdue, he had three years of research experience in zeolite membrane separation technology.

Alumni

Dr. Arun Giridhar

Dr. Arun Giridhar joined the group in Fall 2005. He developed a method to solve the long-standing problem of synthesizing multicomponent distillation configurations with a focus on reducing the heat duty requirement. He successfully defended his Ph.D. in Fall 2008 and is currently a post-doctoral researcher with the Engineering Research Center for Structured Organic Particulate Systems (ERC-SOPS) at Purdue University. He is working on real-time process control and informatics in particulate and pharmaceutical systems.

Dr. Rugved Pathare

Dr. Rugved Pathare joined the group as a graduate student in Fall 2005. His research area focused on developing a framework for the design and optimization of membrane separation schemes. Rugved successfully defended his Ph.D. in Summer 2010.

Dr. Vishesh Shah

Dr. Vishesh Shah joined the group as a graduate student in Fall 2006. He developed a systematic mathematical framework to identify energy efficient multicomponent distillation sequences with a focus on thermally coupled distillation sequences. He successfully defended his Ph.D. in Fall 2010.

Dr. Anirudh Shenvi

Dr. Anirudh Shenvi joined the group as a graduate student in Fall 2007. Focusing on identifying useful heat integration approaches in distillation and synthesizing energy efficient multicomponent distillation sequences, he successfully defended his Ph.D. in Spring 2012.

Dr. Easa Al-Musleh

Dr. Easa Al-Musleh joined the group as a graduate student in Summer 2008. His research focused on identifying energy efficient refrigeration cycles for a given application. He demonstrated this using Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) systems. He also studied efficient separation of natural gas liquids (NGLs). He successfully defended in Spring 2014.

	Dr. Joshua Huff	Joshua Huff joined the group as a graduate student in Spring 2010. His research focused on applying principles of membrane design and optimization to determine the optimal membrane cascade arrangement for multicomponent separations, as well as using principles of exergy and cost analysis to identify attractive distillation configurations. He successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis in Fall 2014.
	Dr. Ulaganathan Nallasivam	Dr. Ulaganathan Nallasivam joined the group as a post doctoral research associate in Spring 2010. His research area focuses on globally optimal configuration for multicomponent distillation sequences and energy network problems.

Dr. Haibo Zhang

Dr. Haibo Zhang joined the group as a post doctoral research associate in Spring 2012. His research area focuses on capital cost modeling and a mixed-integer formulation for optimizing distillation configurations.

Jeremy Zeller

Jeremy Zeller joined the group as an undergraduate researcher in Fall 2009. He worked on developing general concepts for low-cost distillation schemes.