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What is Division



An Overview of the Division of Fluid Particle Processing


What is Division

The division is a group of members of the Society of Chemical Engineers (SCEJ) exchanging ideas and research and development results on subjects of their common interests but at the same time representing one significant area of chemical engineering. A member of SCEJ is encouraged to join two three divisions, receive information, actively join discussions, present papers and contributing the progress of knowledge and technology.

The Division of Fluid-Particle Processing is the biggest among divisions in SCEJ and you can get to know quite a few active researchers and engineers quite easy. You can find many symposiums, seminars, international meetings organized by the division. Our division is also active valuating the work of members giving four different kinds of awards, Symposium Awards, including Award for Encouragement and Presentation Award, Technology Award, Frontier Award and Video Imaging Award.

If you look into the fundamental structure of chemical engineering, you will find both seed-originated, or fundamental, areas and need, or application, oriented areas. We can call the former ‘warp yarn’ and the latter ‘weft yarn’ since the former comes from some fundamental principles and reaches to the phenomena vertically and the latter has a trans-disciplinary nature combining areas horizontally.

Not to mention, our Division of Fluid Particle Processing belongs to the former and other divisions such as environment and/or energy divisions to the latter.

The dynamism of chemical engineering has been managing both kinds of areas making them into a fabric. A chemical engineer should better construct his or her activities both toward fundamentals and applications so that he or she can contribute to the academic and/or technological research needs, since both of them become sometimes fundamental and sometimes quite trans-disciplinary. Particularly, the fluid-particle processing is related to quite a few subfields of chemical engineering, from material processing, drug design, gas-liquid and fluid-solid operations, bioprocesses, food processes, agricultural engineering, chemical reactor development, chemical process designs, environmental regulations, waste management, energy engineering, mining and smelting, and even civil engineering issues.

The division has five subdivisions, i.e. mixing, fluidization, bubble, droplet and slurries, particle processing, and general heat-mass-fluid. The latter subdivision is a sort of commons in our division, like the ‘weft yarn’ in our division, dealing with common issues among other subdivisions. Fluid and particles are related in many folds; for instance, any fluid can be treated a sum of particle like distinct elements with certain interactions among them, and any group particles tend to behave fluid like under certain conditions; Moreover, in many cases particles behavior is affected very much by the surrounding fluid, also fluid behavior is very much affected by the presence of particles. Also, the ‘fluid-particle’ concept is related to many other disciplines such as meteorology, soil science, and social sciences. Indeed, particle simulation is quite close to traffic and crowd simulation. Now, you see you have a number of very good reasons to know both, i.e., fluid and particles, in more detail.

Join our division and subdivision now!

〔 Masayuki Horio：Professor, Emeritus, Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology 〕