Overview

This conference is in honour of Professor Uğur Tüzün who died suddenly in December 2021. Up until his death he had been a very active researcher in particle technology with some inspiring work on a host of problems, such as gravity driven flows, mixing and segregation, tomographic measurement of granular flow, particle degradation and computer modelling. Much of his work is still very much of relevance in industry today and followed by researchers and industrial practitioners in diverse fields.

This meeting is organised in Uğur’s name, to recognise his contribution to particle technology. A good mix of academic and industrial speakers are invited to present their recent research in related areas, or their reinterpretation of Uğur’s earlier work.

Speakers

Mike Adams, Professor of Product Engineering, University of Birmingham

Mike joined the University of Birmingham in the School of Chemical Engineering as Professor of Product Engineering and Manufacturing in 2004 from Unilever R&D, where he was a senior scientist with responsibilities for materials science and product processing.

He is the recipient of the Donald Julius Groen Prize for outstanding achievements in interface engineering, the Tribology Trust Silver Medal for outstanding and sustained achievements in tribology and a special award at the 6^th International Granulation Workshop (Sheffield 2013), in recognition of outstanding contributions to the development of agglomeration science.

He has published over 230 scientific papers, 12 patents and co-edited four books including Tribology in Particulate Technology. His research interests include interparticle interactions, eg elastoviscoplastic, nonlinear viscoelastic, elastohydrodynamic and modelling eg molecular and discrete particle.

Mojtaba Ghadiri, Professor of Chemical Engineering, University of Leeds

Mojtaba is a Professor of Chemical Engineering at the University of Leeds, UK, with research activities on particle technology, and focussing on the link between bulk particulate solids behaviour and single particle properties with the aid of simulations by combined DEM and CFD.

Application areas of interest are cohesive powder flow and fluidisation, size reduction and enlargement, environmental effects and electrical phenomena in particulate systems. For details of the current projects, collaborators and publications, please visit: http://ghadiri-group.leeds.ac.uk.

Nicolin Govender, Associate Principal Scientist, Mondelez

Nicolin is an associate principal scientist at Mondelez International in the position of global lead for granular materials. He is also a visiting professor at the university of Johannesburg in the area of 4IR.

His current research is on solving industrial granular materials problems where the tools and knowledge he has developed in the past decade make it possible to provide insight where academic practitioners and engineers with commercial tools fail.

He has been working on GPUs since the advent of general-purpose GPU computing in 2008 and is an esteemed international expert in the field. He has solely developed the GPU-based DEM code “Blaze-DEM” and has published over 40 papers on DEM considering particle shape effects using polyhedra along with over 50 papers in particle physics.

Prashant Gupta, Senior Scientist, P&G

Prashant is a senior scientist at P&G based at Newcastle innovation centre. Prashant has been with the company for 7 years and has interests in process and product design of cleaning products.

Prashant did his PhD at University of Edinburgh under Marie Curie ITN framework PARDEM. Prof Tüzün was a supervisor and advisor to his PhD.

Raffaella Ocone, Chemical Engineer

Raffaella graduated in chemical engineering from the Università di Napoli, Italy and obtained her MA and PhD from Princeton University, USA. She holds the Chair of Chemical Engineering at Heriot-Watt University since 1999 and she is a Visiting Professor at RUHR Universität, Bochum, Germany. She is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the Institution of Chemical Engineers, and the Royal Society of Chemistry.

In 2007, she was appointed Cavaliere by the President of the Italian Republic. In The Queen’s 2019 New Year Honours she was appointed Officer of the British Empire (OBE) for services to engineering. Raffaella was named as one of the top 100 Most Influential Women in the Engineering Sector in 2019 in the list produced by board appointments firm Inclusive Boards in partnership with the Financial Times.

Raffaella was the first “Caroline Herschel Visiting Professor” in Engineering at RUHR Universität, Bochum, Germany in recognition of her work in ethics in engineering. Raffaella’s main area of research is in the field of modelling multiphase reactive systems with emphasis to the development of responsible technologies in the energy arena. She has taken the lead in the teaching of engineering ethics.  

Jonathan Seville, Professor of Formulation Engineering, University of Birmingham

Jonathan is Professor of Formulation Engineering at the University of Birmingham and former Dean of Engineering and Physical Sciences at the University of Surrey. He is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering and was President of the Institution of Chemical Engineers (IChemE) in 2016-17.

As new young lecturers at the University of Surrey in the 1980s, he and Uğur Tüzün were colleagues, together with Mojtaba Ghadiri, in an exciting new Particle Technology research group led by Roland Clift. Collectively, they tried to create a new understanding of particle technology, based on the microscopic physics of particle mechanics, and developed some new characterisation and modelling methods along the way.

Jonathan is co-author with Uğur and Roland of the textbook “Processing of Particulate Solids” (Blackie, 1997) and more recently co-authored “Particle Technology and Engineering” (Elsevier, 2016) with Charley Wu. He is currently working on particle-related projects with the Birmingham Positron Imaging Centre and on chemical recycling of plastic waste.

Csaba Sinka, Professor in Mechanics of Materials, University of Leicester

Csaba obtained his PhD from Imperial College London and joined the University of Leicester as a Research Associate working on constitutive model development for powder compaction.

He then worked for six years in pharmaceutical formulation design and process development for Merck in the US and UK as a Research Fellow and contributed to: modelling of pharmaceutical tablet compaction by linking density distributions in tablets to hardness, friability and disintegration, and introduced X-ray CT and NMR imaging to tablets.

He re-joined Leicester in 2006 and presently is a Professor in Mechanics of Materials. His research includes multi-scale and multi-physics modelling problems involving particle formation, formulation, powder flow, and compaction. His current focus is on digital manufacturing.

Rex Thorpe, University of Surrey

Rex was educated at Queens’ College, Cambridge obtaining MEng and PhD degrees in chemical engineering. His first conference presentation was at a conference on Silos in Braunschweig which he attended with his co-author Uğur Tüzün. He then worked for Brown and Root (UK) for one year in South London (and for 3 months on secondment to BP at the Sulom Voe Oil Terminal on Shetland) before joining the lecturing staff of the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Cambridge.

He was invited to apply successfully for a chair at the University of Surrey in 2001 by the then Head of Department, Uğur Tüzün who he succeeded in 2008 holding the post until 2016. He has published 140 papers in the fields of multiphase flow, fluidised beds, process and equipment design, energy from waste and powder technology, 12 with Uğur Tüzün as a co-author.

Amalia Thomas, Senior R&D Officer, Freeman Technology

Amalia is the Senior R&D Officer at powder characterisation company Freeman Technology and is based at the company’s headquarters in Tewkesbury, UK. Obtaining her MSc in Physics at UNCBPA, Argentina, she later completed her PhD in Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at the University of Cambridge (2019), specialising in dense granular free-surface flow rheology and size segregation. Amalia joined Freeman Technology in early 2020 and manages a variety of R&D projects, working with both industrial and academic partners, to advance the understanding of fundamental powder behaviour and how this can be applied to address diverse powder handling challenges. 

Filip Francqui, Managing Director, Granutools

Filip is the managing director of Granutools. Before founding Granutools, Filip has managed various businesses for the electronic microscopy subsidiary of Thermo Fisher Scientific known as FEI, a company famous for high resolution imaging. Filip started his career working for the Dutch semiconductor equipment manufacturer ASML in R&D. Filip holds a Master Degree in Applied Physics from the Free University of Brussels (Belgium) and an MBA from INSEAD (Singapore). He has numerous publications in scientific journals and holds multiple patents.