Description:

The Chemical and Biological Engineering Department is pleased to present our Annual Richard S. H. Mah Lectures with special guest Marianthi Ierapetritou from the University of Delaware.

Dr. Ierapetritou will present a lecture for the Chemical Engineering Department titled "Process Systems Engineering in the Era of Big-Data and Industry 4.0 Revolution."

ABSTRACT: The development of chemical process industry and process systems engineering (PSE) have been supported in part by the accessibility and availability of computational power, simulation platforms, and data from different sources. In the last few years, we have witnessed a few attempts on implementation of Industry 4.0, digital twin, and artificial intelligence (AI) to capitalize on the generation of large volumes of data. The data revolution demands the PSE community to adapt the methodologies to fully leverage the additional resources for accurate representation of processes and detailed analyses. The tools can facilitate process development, system analysis, and optimization, supporting goals in areas like sustainability, circular economy, and public health. 

Process modeling remains a critical PSE tool to describe complex physical processes based on system understanding. With data revolution, there are challenges in incorporating information of different scales, and in the extent of data involvement. A wide spectrum of modeling activities will be presented to demonstrate the different possibilities. Using the developed models, optimization can be performed to identify optimal conditions of the most important variables identified using sensitivity analysis, while satisfying important operability and product quality constraints. Such in silico optimization results can provide insights to the experimental work, but as model complexity increases, the optimization task becomes computationally demanding. To tackle this challenge, surrogate-based optimization has been developed. 

In the implementation of all these tools, data uncertainty is a critical issue and uncertainty quantification (UQ) approaches are applied to address this issue. The need to assess uncertainties through sensitivity analysis due to limited data availability will be demonstrated together with UQ in optimization frameworks including stochastic programming, flexibility analysis, and robust optimization for various applications. 

Marianthi Ierapetritou is the Bob and Jane Gore Centennial Chair Professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at University of Delaware. Prior to that she has been a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Chemical and Biochemical Engineering at Rutgers University. During the last year at Rutgers University, she led the efforts of the university advancing the careers in STEM for women at Rutgers as an Associate Vice President of the University. 

Dr. Ierapetritou’s research focuses on the following areas: 1) process operations; (2) design and synthesis of flexible production systems with emphasis on pharmaceutical manufacturing; 3) energy and sustainability process modeling and operations; and 4) modeling of biopharmaceutical production. Her research is supported by several federal (FDA, NIH, NSF, ONR, NASA, DOE) and industrial (BMS, J&J, GSK, PSE, Bosch, Eli Lilly) grants.

Among her accomplishments are the appointment as the Gore Centennial Professor in 2019, the promotion to distinguished professor at Rutgers University in 2017, the 2016 Computing and Systems Technology (CAST) division Award in Computing in Chemical Engineering which is the highest distinction in the Systems area of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE), the Award of Division of Particulate Preparations and Design (PPD) of The Society of Powder Technology, Japan; the Outstanding Faculty Award at Rutgers; the Rutgers Board of Trustees Research Award for Scholarly Excellence; and the prestigious NSF CAREER award. She has served as a Consultant to the FDA under the Advisory Committee for Pharmaceutical Science and Clinical Pharmacology, elected as a fellow of AICHE and as a Director in the board of AIChE. She has more than 290 publications and has been an invited speaker to numerous national and international conferences.

Dr. Ierapetritou obtained her BS from The National Technical University in Athens, Greece, her PhD from Imperial College (London, UK) in 1995 and subsequently completed her post-doctoral research at Princeton University (Princeton, NJ). 

Bagels and coffee will be provided at 11am, and the seminar will start at 11:10am. Please plan to arrive on time to grab a bagel and mingle!