Designing Chemical Engineering for the Future in Teaching and Research

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• Professor Gordon McKay, Hong Kong University of Science & Technology
• Monday 24 March 2008, 11:00-12:00
• Churchill College Møller Centre.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Peter Robinson.

Prof Gordon McKay will present an outline of his recent research projects in Hong Kong and which have been primarily driven by his pioneering work on the development and application of cheap adsorbents in the early 70s at Queen’s University. He will describe the range of pollutants, the sources and types of novel adsorbents, the range of adsorber contacting systems, and he will outline some of his pilot plant scale R & D projects.

In the second part of his presentation Prof McKay will discuss some of the results obtained in the adsorption/exchange studies for the removal of dyes from textile effluents and the removal of metal ions from the microelectronics industry effluents. There are typically four phases to an adsorption study: adsorbent selection, equilibrium, batch and fixed bed studies. Equilibrium isotherms are used to define the capacity of an adsorbent for a pollutant. Batch kinetics analyse adsorption rate process. These pollutant studies enable mass transfer coefficients, diffusitivities and kinetic parameters to be determined. Most industrial systems are based on fixed bed adsorption and there are several problems in trying the predict the performance of fixed beds simply from equilibrium and batch studies. Therefore, pilot scale fixed bed studies are undertaken prior to full scale fixed bed design. Mass transfer and kinetic modeling on all the phases of an adsorption study have been carried out.

This talk is part of the Alfaisal University Engineering Seminars series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• Alfaisal University Engineering Seminars
• Churchill College Møller Centre

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