About this community

Includes research areas relevant to food, pharmaceuticals, water, energy and polymers (i.e. most aspects of our everyday life) and is centrally concerned with sustainable development and the related issues of safety, health and the environment

On 1 August 2008, the Department of Chemical Engineering and the Institute of Biotechnology merged to become the Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology.

The Department of Chemical Engineering was founded in 1948. With the enormous advances in theory and practice since then, chemical engineering has developed from its initial base around the reaction and processing of liquids and gases to include the processing of biological materials and solid or solid-like materials of all kinds. Chemical engineering is thus relevant to food, pharmaceuticals, water, energy and polymers (i.e. most aspects of our everyday life) and is centrally concerned with sustainable development and the related issues of safety, health and the environment.

Key research areas:

• Processes: gasification and combustion, multi-scale reaction engineering, catalysis, bio-separations, gene therapy, carbon sequestration, adsorption-separations, granular flows, microreactor technology
• Microstructure Engineering: paste processing, rheology of complex fluids, pharmaceutical delivery, adsorbents, food engineering
• Measurement Techniques: sensors, X-ray diffraction, THz imaging, magnetic resonance imaging, laser analytics, reactive flow imaging, light scattering, fluid dynamic gauging
• Modelling: process optimisation: CFD, stochastic modelling, molecular modelling, analytical methods, lattice Boltzmann methods.