Welcome to Process Fluidics Group

Director: Prof. R.W.K. Allen

Welcome to the web page of the Process Fluidics Group. We are a lively team working in a broad range of areas with a unified core involving visualising and modelling reacting flows. We are trying always to apply these skills in areas that are of particular significance to the Chemical Engineering problems of the future. Examples include: enhancing understanding of the nature and modeling of turbulence, modernisation of production processes for fuels particularly for generation of hydrogen at a massive scale to fuel the hydrogen economy; step change reactor design; high throughput testing and micro-chemical engineering ("plant on a chip").

The Group's work strives to combine a strongly theoretical approach with a direct application to practical systems of both immediate and longer-term interest to Industry.

The Group is strongly collaborative in outlook and has well established cross disciplinary interactions with other leading academic research groups both at Sheffield where the links with our Chemistry Department are exceptionally strong and elsewhere for example the Chemistry Departments of the Universities of Hull, Nottingham and Belfast, the Ecole Polytechnique at Kharkov, Northern Illinois University, USA, The University of Fukui, and Tokyo University, Japan; The Czech Academy of Sciences and UMIST.

In addition we are proud of our many longstanding (> 5years) continuous industrial interactions for example, Shell, BNFL, AEA Technology, DERA/MOD and DIPPS. More recent industrial interactions have included iAc, Astra Zeneca, Novartis, Volkswagen, Germany, Hoover, Smith Beecham and Westinghouse.

The work of the Group has 5 strands.

• Microfluidics and microchemical Engineering
• Biophysicochemical hydrodynamics
• Hydrogen production
• Green chemistry
• Power fluidics

Our new laboratories combine a unique blend of facilities for synthetic organic and polymer chemistry and catalyst preparation and testing; ‘clean’ room facilities for micro reactor chip fabrication and analytical characterisation and a dark room for laser-based micro fluidic visualisation and electro-optic characterisation of polymers. Furthermore, we have a second new laboratory to house our new multinuclear NMR facility which will look at novel materials for applications in Nanotechnology and catalyst evaluation.