Rakesh Agrawal is the Winthrop E. Stone Distinguished Professor of Chemical Engineering at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. He is a chemical engineer known for contributions to separations, cryogenic gas separation and liquefaction, and for contributions to renewable energy including the conversion of biomass to chemicals and fuels, inorganic solar cell fabrication, and the synergistic use of solar energy.
Early life and education Dr. Agrawal received a B.Tech. in chemical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur, India, in 1975; a M. Ch.E. from the University of Delaware in Dover, Delaware in 1977, and an Sc.D. in chemical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1980.
Career In 1980, Rakesh Agrawal joined Air Products in Trexlertown, Pennsylvania, where he was appointed to Air Products Fellow. In 2002, Agrawal was elected as a member of the National Academy of Engineering for contributions to the development and worldwide implementation of high-efficiency and high-purity cryogenic and non-cryogenic gas separation processes.
Contributions to separations and gas liquefaction While at Air Products, Dr. Agrawal contributed to improvements in the efficiency of natural gas liquefaction, electronic gases manufacturing, cryogenic processing and gas separation. He led the development of the APX process for natural gas liquefaction that more than doubled the production from a single train. For semiconductor applications, Agrawal invented Column-Plus and Double Column-Plus ultra high purity (UHP) nitrogen and UHP liquid oxygen processes that reduce product impurities to less than one part per billion. He invented an efficient process to recover refrigeration from liquefied natural gas to produce liquid nitrogen and oxygen. Agrawal introduced several firsts in the arena of separations using distillation. For multicomponent separations, he introduced a new class of satellite column arrangements and a new superstructure that completed the set of basic column configurations available for distillation. He discovered a solution to the long-standing problem of making highly energy efficient thermally coupled columns operable by making vapor flow between columns unidirectional. Agrawal presented a generalized framework to convert classical two-way thermal coupling to one-way liquid only transfer, thereby eliminating the challenge involved with the intercolumn vapor transfer between the thermally coupled distillation columns. This enabled the creation of multi-effect distillation analogs of thermally-coupled distillation columns resulting in a further potential for up to 50% reduction in the energy consumption of the already efficient thermally coupled configuration. Contrary to the assumption that fully thermally coupled systems are the most energy efficient among the basic configurations, Agrawal showed that the thermodynamic efficiency of this system can often be worse than the other configurations. In 2001, for process intensification, he introduced a number of dividing wall column schemes including ones for side rectifier and side stripper configurations. In 2003, Agrawal extended the concept of using dividing wall columns for batch distillation. Later his team introduced a new class of dividing wall columns and a generalized method to draw the corresponding dividing wall column for any given thermally coupled configuration. First, he led the development of the Shah and Agrawal method to elucidate all feasible basic n-1 distillation column configurations for the separation of an n-component non-azeotropic mixture with n greater than 3, and then in collaboration with professor Mohit Tawarmalani, developed optimization methods to rank-list these thousands to millions of configurations according to their heat duty, exergy, and cost. Agrawal has also published methods to draw membrane cascades using a limited number of compressors for high recovery of products at high purity. In analogy to multicomponent distillation configurations, he introduced membrane cascade schemes for multi-component gas separation. These membrane cascades can also be utilized for liquid separations by replacing compressors with pumps.
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