Reactor simulation takes EFCE prize

07-06-2010: Maarten Sabbe, a chemical engineering PhD student at the University of Gent in Belgium has been awarded the 2010 EFCE Excellence Award in Chemical Reaction Engineering.

Sabbe won the award for his PhD thesis, Ab initio based kinetic modelling for the simulation of industrial chemical processes. His study presented a simulation of an industrial chemical reactor developed solely on thermodynamic and kinetic calculations based on quantum chemistry.

Prof. Marie-Françoise Reyniers, who supervised Sabbe’s PhD project and nominated him for the award said that she was totally convinced that the work deserved the award and she said, “Maarten has proven to be capable of coping with the many challenges related to extrapolation from the molecular to the industrial scale.”

Prof. Reyniers went on to say, “Maarten’s steam cracking reactor simulations based on the group additive models consistently developed from first principles can certainly be viewed as a key contribution in the field of reaction engineering. The success of his simulation clearly shows that the integration of computational chemistry methods with engineering tools at larger time and length scales provides a predictive tool that can be used for the design and optimization of industrial chemical processes.”

The award will be presented in August at the 7th European Congress of Chemical Engineering/CHISA in Prague, Czech Republic