mit che  
  department of chemical engineering
  Faculty, staff, students, post-docs, visitors
Chemical Engineering and the Department News, events and seminars Faculty, staff, students, post-docs, visitors Undergraduate program in ChE Graduate program in ChE Topics and people Careers and recruiting Resources for ChE faculty, staff and students
 
Faculty, staff, students, post-docs, visitors
faculty
staff
students
vistors/post-doc
back to
che
mit

Kenneth A. Smith
Current Research

Fluid mechanics and transport processes continue to be surprisingly rich sources of phenomena which are novel, important and either industrially or biologically relevant. Often, these phenomena arise in the context of a fluid/fluid interface, either because the interface is a locus of property discontinuities or because transport across the interface alters its properties. For example, the flatness of a thin coating is usually determined by these considerations. In other cases, macroscopic models must recognize the rather short range forces which arise from the very presence of an interface. This is particularly true if surfactants are present. Stability of an emulsion and rupture of thin liquid films, for example, are each a consequence of these short range forces. At present the dynamics of fluid/fluid interfaces, as in the formation of vesicles from a planar interface, are particularly ill-understood and their elucidation will require the application of both macroscopic and microscopic approaches.

Current activity is drawn largely from three areas: supercritical water oxidation, surfactant dynamics, and environmental modeling. The first of these attempts to capitalize on the observation that oxygen and most organic materials are fully soluble in supercritical water. Thus, diffusion barriers to oxidation are largely absent and this technology can be an attractive one for pollutant destruction. Unfortunately, other limitations do arise due to stratification associated with density gradients and due to the precipitation of inorganic salts. The subject of surfactant dynamics is interesting because so little is known about it, and because experiments suggest that the time scale is often surprisingly long, i.e. of order 100 ms. Current efforts attempt to develop an understanding of this through both experiments and modeling. The latter is a combination of molecular and continuum approaches. With regard to environmental modeling, the emphasis is directed at the role of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH) in the atmosphere. Particular attention is directed at the association of PAH with atmospheric aerosols and the resulting transport dynamics. The development of advanced instrumentation is an integral part of this effort.

< back to bio