Professor Kenneth R. Jolls

Visualization in Chemical Engineering

Visualizing the results of numeric analyses using high-performance computer graphics holds great promise for chemical engineering research, practice, and teaching. Visual thinking invokes powerful intellectual pathways that are often underused by scientists and engineers. Many areas of chemical engineering have visualizable components -- concepts dealing with structures, stresses, fields, and phases abound throughout the discipline. Computer simulation in these areas yields results that are often better interpreted visually -- through static or dynamic views of relevant structures. I am endeavoring to exploit these new techniques as they apply to the fields of chemical thermodynamics and separations.

Interpreting thermodynamic stability and phase equilibrium through high-performance graphics:

One of J.W. Gibbs' most important contributions to classical thermodynamics was the concept of a "fundamental" equation. Such functions contain complete information about the state of an equilibrium system and are useful pedagogically as well as for purposes of data manipulation. While fundamental equations may be treated formally in modern courses, there is little known generally about them nor about the various forms into which they may be cast. The few drawings and models that do exist have become little more than museum pieces.

At Göttingen in 1929, the German physicist Max Born identified the Legendre transform as the mathematical tool for moving thermodynamic information from one fundamental form to another. Laszlo Tisza sat in Born's lectures and was later influenced by them when he developed his Macroscopic Thermodynamics of Equilibrium. Tisza's student, Herbert Callen, continued that tradition in his well known monograph, and MIT chemical engineers Michael Modell and Robert Reid extended it in their textbook Thermodynamics and Its Applications.