Nature-Inspired Engineering: Drawing Inspiration from Nature to Engineer Innovative Solutions to our Grand Challenges.
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Nature-Inspired Engineering: Drawing Inspiration from Nature to Engineer Innovative Solutions to our Grand Challenges.
Fri, 05/05/2017 - 11:15 to 12:15
Location:
Speaker:
Prof Marc-Olivier Coppens
Affiliation:
University College London
Synopsis:
Research in the Centre for Nature Inspired Engineering at UCL applies fundamental mechanisms underlying desirable properties in natural systems to address engineering problems, while cognizant of the often-different context of the natural and the technological problem. Desirable properties include scalability, efficiency, robustness and adaptability. The motivation behind our work is double: (1) Our challenges related to energy, environment, water, healthcare and sustainable production are enormous, and so require truly transformative solutions, with a radically different approach, beyond the incremental changes offered by well-travelled paths; (2) Nature offers many examples of exceptional performance, well beyond that of similar processes in technology, by applying mechanisms that are under-resourced in technology. Hence, there is a huge gap to bridge, but there is hope, and unraveling nature’s “secrets” is a way to achieve a more sustainable world.
Our nature-inspired (chemical) engineering (NICE) approach focuses primarily on a number of ubiquitous mechanisms, including hierarchical transport networks (such as in lungs, the vascular network and trees), force-balancing (not only at macroscopic scales, but also at the nanoscale, as in aquaporins or chaperones), and dynamic self-organization (both in non-living matter, like regular patterns on sand dunes, and biological systems, like the organization of bacteria or people). Nature is particularly powerful in its ways to maintain functionality over a wide range of scales, apply nano-confinement to achieve higher performance in, for example, separation and catalytic processes, and use dynamics as an organizing principle for adaptability and healing.
After a general introduction, we will illustrate the NICE approach in the context of chemical process intensification (for scalable, more efficient and robust manufacturing processes) and the design and synthesis of porous materials for a variety of functions, from (bio)catalysis and separations to fuel cells and biomedical applications.
Biography:
Marc-Olivier COPPENS is Ramsay Memorial Chair and Head of Department of Chemical Engineering at UCL, since 2012, after academic posts at Rensselaer (2006-2012) and TU Delft, Netherlands (1998-2006), where he became Professor in 2001. He holds chemical engineering degrees (1993; PhD 1996) from Ghent University (Belgium), was visiting scholar at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (1996), and postdoctoral fellow at Yale and UC Berkeley (1997-8).
Since 2013, he is Director of the EPSRC “Frontier Engineering” Centre for Nature Inspired Engineering. He is most recognised for pioneering work on nature-inspired chemical engineering (NICE): learning from fundamental mechanisms behind desirable traits in nature to develop creative and effective solutions to engineering challenges. He has over 150 peer-reviewed scientific publications and delivered more than 50 named lectures, invited plenary and keynote lectures at international conferences. In 2017, he also became Qiushi Chair Professor of Zhejiang University. He is Fellow of AIChE (2016) and IChemE (2014). In 2015, he became AIChE’s first International Director of the Catalysis and Reaction Engineering (CRE) Division. He also serves on AIChE’s Chemical Engineering Technology Operating Council (CTOC) and the Particle Technology Forum (PTF).
He is Editor-in-Chief of Chemical & Engineering Processing: Process Intensification (since 2016) and also serves on several Editorial Boards, including Chemical Engineering Science and Powder Technology, and is Section Editor (with Prof. Tsotsis) for Reaction Engineering and Catalysis for Current Opinion in Chemical Engineering. He is Advisory Board Member of the Chemical Engineering Departments of Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and Universidad de los Andes (Colombia).