Volume 8 Issue 6
Zhu, J. (2010b). Preamble for special issue honouring Professor Mooson Kwauk. Particuology, 8(6), 491-492. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.partic.2010.10.001
Preamble for special issue honouring Professor Mooson Kwauk
10.1016/j.partic.2010.10.001
Volume 8, Issue 6,
December 2010,
Pages 491-492
Available online 30 October 2010.
E-mail:
jzhu@uwo.ca
Highlights
Abstract
Two years after assuming a new name and format change, the year 2010 marks the 8th anniversary of Particuology. To commemorate this special occasion for the journal, the thematic editors met in Montreal at the 8th World Congress of Chemical Engineering and decided to compile a truly special issue. Instead of producing another “conventional” special issue of the more “regular” research papers on some given subjects, we have decided to take a more innovative format for this issue to present short discussion papers that provide quick overviews of the current status of selected subjects and then discuss forward thinking for the future. With the increasing number of journals and publications available today, researchers find it increasingly difficult to follow the many papers that an on-line search can bring to their desktop. To help our readers to survive such a vast jungle land, we have invited some of the world's best and foremost researchers to present relatively short overview papers that outline the current status of various subjects, thereby linking the readers quickly to the key references in their respective areas, and in turn, bringing forward thinking to the future of research.
Now, we are very pleased to present this very special issue of Particuology, with 30 papers brining many insights into the subjects of particuology. This is now under the scrutiny of our readers and we hope that they will find this new format opens a new way for efficient information transmission. We are fairly confident that this will be successful, because we have received strong support from many of our senior colleagues. This special issue now includes contributions from many of the world's leading researchers in this area, without whom this special issue is not possible. We are particularly grateful to several famous emeritus researchers who agreed to “re-emerge” from their quiet lifestyle to share their valuable experiences with the younger generation.
We would also like to dedicate this special issue to our Editor-in-Chief, Professor Mooson Kwauk, on the occasion of his 90th birthday. Prof. Kwauk is a world renowned and seasoned chemical engineer, in this field of particle technology and fluidization. In 1948, with the late Professor Richard Wilhelm and extracting from his masters thesis project during 1945–1946, Professor Kwauk published the research paper entitled “Fluidization of Solid Particles”, which marked the introduction of a more theoretical approach to analyzing fluidization phenomena. For the first time, its authors proposed two distinctive modes of fluidization at a time when fluidization was still in its infancy, “particulate” and “aggregative” fluidization, a concept that formed the basis of fluidization and are still used as textbook standard terms. Now, some 65 years later, we are still seeing very dedicated research papers coming from Prof. Kwauk…. Owing to such genuine respect to a truly pioneer researcher, so many of us “gathered” here in this special issue of Particuology.
Prof. Kwauk's contributions to the profession of chemical engineering have been widely acknowledged with many accolades and special recognitions. At its centennial celebration in 2008, the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) recognized Prof. Kwauk as one of the fifty Chemical Engineers of the “Foundation Age”, who “founded the profession and established the discipline in the first half of the 20th century”. Returning to his homeland in 1956, Professor Kwauk single-handedly introduced fluidization to China, leading to its widespread applications in the world most populated country. For his outstanding contributions to fluidization, he has obtained for three times the awards by the State Council of China and Chinese Academy of Sciences. Internationally, he was the awardee of International Fluidization Award of Achievement by the Engineering Foundation and of the Lectureship Award in Fluidization by AIChE. Prof. Kwauk is also the most invited Chinese chemical engineer to deliver plenary and special lectures abroad, including the fourth P.V. Danckwerts Memorial Lecture. Prof. Kwauk is a Member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, as well as a Corresponding Member of the Swiss Academy of Engineering Science.
Born in 1920, in Hanyang, Hubei Province, China, Prof. Kwauk entered the University of Shanghai in 1939 to study chemistry. After graduation in 1943, he worked for two years as a chemist in two Shanghai factories before entering the graduate school of Princeton University where he obtained his Masters degree in Chemical Engineering in 1946, under the supervision of Prof. Richard Wilhelm. Then he worked at Hydrocarbon Research Inc. on the development of processes for coal gasification, air separation, gas purification and gaseous reduction of iron ore; leading to three US patents. He also spent time with the Coca-Cola Export Corporation, where he worked on multiple projects including setting up the first Coca-Cola manufacturing facility in New Delhi. In 1956, Professor Kwauk returned to China and joined the Institute of Chemical Metallurgy (now Institute of Process Engineering) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences as a professor, where he established the first research laboratory on fluidization and led to its wide applications in the chemical and metallurgy industries. Less known to the outside world are his contributions to the metallurgical industry where he applied fluidized bed technology to roasting of iron ores, extractive metallurgy, leaching, and washing.
Prof. Kwauk has made eminent contributions to the profession of chemical engineering and in particular to fluidization and particuology. Following the landmark work of distinguishing particulate and aggregative fluidization, and concurrently with his more practical work for the metallurgical industry, he spent some of his earlier years in Chinese Academy of Sciences to develop the generalized fluidization theory. Two classical papers were published on this subject in 1963 and 1964 in Scientia Sinica, which are still wroth studying now nearly 50 years after their initial publication. The many carefully scrutinized derivations and correlations demonstrated his early efforts in understanding the fluidization theory and in predicting flow behaviour beyond those that have been observed experimentally. Among other things, the generalized fluidization theory has successfully predicted the three-section axial flow structure in the downer system, which was only experimentally verified more than 25 years later.
Recognizing the unfavourable gas–solid contact mode with gas by-passing and solid back-mixing in the traditional bubbling fluidized bed, Prof. Kwauk started a series of studies on multi-layer shallow fluidized bed, where the mass transfer is very favourable in the jetting distributor region. Owing to this line of thoughts, once seeing the proposed concept of fast fluidized bed (now more often called circulating fluidized bed), Prof. Kwauk and his younger colleagues quickly saw its potential and started systematic work in this area, leading to the first comprehensive study on the axial flow structure of the fast fluidized bed in 1980. Following the same line of thoughts in respect to bubbleless fluidization, Prof. Kwauk has also worked extensively on vibro-fluidization and magneto-fluidization.
Another major contribution of Prof. Kwauk to the fluidization field is the effort to understand and unify the aggregative and particulate fluidization by illustrating the fluidization patterns lying between particulate and aggregative fluidization. This so called “intermediate zone fluidization” or “intermediate-state fluidization” was successfully studied by his group utilizing supercritical CO2 having density and viscosity between those of gases and liquids. This classical study clearly revealed the fluidized state changing progressively from aggregative to particulate when fluidized separately by gas, supercritical fluid and liquids, indicating an infinite number of intermediate states existing between aggregative and particulate fluidization, using a heterogeneity index and a nonideality index to quantitatively index the fluidization quality.
Over the last 65 years, it appears that Prof. Kwauk never stops thinking. To deepen the theoretical understanding of the fluidization phenomena, Prof. Kwauk and his team, has developed the energy-minimization multiscale (EMMS) method, that analyzes and models the multiphase flow behaviour at three different scales together. With microscale of particle size; mesoscale of cluster size; and macroscale for the overall particle–fluid flow system, this new multiscale approach resolves a macroscale heterogeneous system into three subsystems, and then uses the energy minimization as the general constraint to inter-correlate the different scales, achieving a more instrinsic understanding of the complexity of multiscale structure and in turn establishing a new approach for modelling heterogeneous fluid–particle system. This EMMS method has now been widely used by his successors in modelling various fluidized bed processes with great success.
Prof. Kwauk's work represents a systematic investigation on the principles, design and operation of the fluidization and solid–fluid systems and their applications in a number of industries including chemical, petrochemical, energy, metallurgical industries. Serving as the vice president of the Chemical Industry and Engineering Society of China, the president of the Institute of Chemical Engineering of China, and the president of the Chinese Society of Particuology, and also active in many advisory and policy-making committees, Prof. Kwauk has also made numerous important contributions to the Chinese chemical industry.
Prof. Kwauk often says: one man's capacity and time is limited, so that it is paramount to educate and support young people. In the Institute of Process Engineering, he has nurtured hundreds of young colleagues and students, many of whom became prominent researchers, government officials and corporation leaders, world wide, and cultivated an evergreen land for research innovation and process development. Through conferences, short courses, and many other occasions, Prof. Kwauk has influenced and inspired an even larger group of his younger generation, including myself, to dedicate ourselves to science and technology and more importantly to the advancements of mankind. Along the same train of thoughts, Prof. Kwauk has also devoted a significant amount of his energy in disseminating knowledge, including journal editing, conferences and symposia, and short courses. For example, he single-handedly initiated the Chinese National Fluidization Conferences which ran 6 times until evolving into the annual conference for the Chinese Society of Particuology in 1997. He also initiated the China–Japan fluidization conference series that is now in its 11th event. He has chaired and co-chaired several major international fluidization conferences and served as a member of the organizing, advisory and/or scientific committees of almost all other major conferences in this subject area. He has also spent enormous efforts in establishing this journal, Particuology, editing most of the accepted manuscripts by himself, to ensure an excellent quality of the journal.
In addition to chemical engineering, Prof, Kwauk also has many other interests. Unbeknownst to other than his close colleagues and friends, he has actually also developed a second career in making Geometric Mobiles — suspended objects that otherwise quiescent, but oscillating for an extended period of time with a light and pulse wind flow. More significant is that he adopted his perfectionism attitude and used his scientific approaches to develop this mostly hands-on art to a theoretically guided science, eventually publishing a 332-page book in 2008 by Science Press of China, entitled “Geometric Mobiles — Artistic Inspiration and Scientific Analysis”. In the preface of that book, Prof. Kwauk stated “Having gone through a career of R&D in chemical engineering, the author was happy to come across… to this science-cum-art domain…. The syllogism, concept-design-making, is based on the five constraints proposed by the author which serves as the rule-of-the-game in similar manner as for chess and base ball. The crux of the syllogism lies in the quantitative design involving form and equilibrium, and it generally takes the form of mathematical problems…. The author dedicated in all sincerity (this book) to the youth of China, in the hope of cultivating, outside regular curriculum, the hands-on/science-cum-profession attitude, which is the very basis for all innovation, and could be acquired only through practice and participation.”
Indeed, it is such dedication to science and engineering, and to the people and mankind, that makes Prof. Kwauk's professional career a truly outstanding one. His perpetual drive to the very truth of science and engineering has led to a splendid career, full of accomplishments as scholar, researcher, inventor, educator, practitioner, and gentleman.
It is with great honour we present this special issue in honour of Professor Mooson Kwauk.
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