Faculty News

Kerry Dooley co-chaired a session at the 2002 American Institute of Chemical Engineers Annual Meeting on “Materials Processing in Supercritical Fluids.”

Benjamin McCoy presented three papers at the 2002 American Institute of Chemical Engineers Annual Meeting in Indianapolis entitled as follows, “Two-Phase Mixing Dynamics during Coalescence and Breakage,” “Dynamics of Multiscale Phase Transitions: Nucleation, Growth, and Ripening,” and “Kinetics and Thermodynamics of Pressure-Induced Glass Formation.”

Danny Reible presented numerous seminars this past year on his research into the “Sequestration and Bioavailability of PAHs in Sediments.” The seminars were presented at Mississippi State University, University of Texas at El Paso, University of Michigan, and the Army Engineering Research and Development Center in Vicksburg, Mississippi.

Kalliat Valsaraj chaired a session at the 2002 American Institute of Chemical Engineers Annual Meeting on “Prediction and Correlation of Transport Properties.”

Faculty Awards

Armando Corripio and Kerry Dooley were awarded $10,000 from ExxonMobil to continue their study of “EPDM Modeling and Online Optimization.”

Elizabeth Podlaha was recently awarded $1.3 million from NSF for the study of “Electrodeposition of Nanostructured Multilayers.” Podlaha will act as lead principle investigator in the collaborative project with Julia Chan from the Department of Chemistry, Dave Young from the Department of Physics & Astronomy, and Michael Murphy and Wanjun Wang from the Department of Mechanical Engineering.

Danny Reible received funding under the Louisiana Biotechnology Initiative to enhance biotechnology efforts in the Hazardous Substance Research Center (HSRC). The funding includes $285,000 in capital equipment funds and $235,000 annually to support the initiative. Efforts will be directed toward the use of molecular biological consortia to achieve improved environmental performance. Applications include in situ remediation of contaminated sites and the improvement of biological treatment of industrial air and water discharge. The HSRC is a consortium of LSU, Rice University, Georgia Tech, and Texas A & M directed to the risk based management of hazardous substances and contaminated soils and sediments. It is funded with a core grant from EPA of approximately one million dollars per year.

Kalliat Valsaraj received further support from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to study air emissions of unexploded ordinance compounds from defense sites.