The Department of Chemical and Biochemical Engineering, Rutgers University

Mission Statement:
While a large segment of the US industry, including the petroleum, chemical, pharmaceuticalchemical, automotive, and energy industries makes and/or uses catalysts, currently there is no academic program focusing on the operations required to make catalytic materials. Thus, catalyst manufacturing processes are often designed relying on empiricism, leading to uncertain/sub-optimal processes, decreased quality, and increased cost. By combining the substantial level of expertise in particle technology, optimization, multi-scale simulation, catalysis and molecular modeling available at Rutgers, we intend to develop and promote science-based methods for designing and optimizing catalyst manufacturing methods and processes such as imprgenation, drying, slurry mixing, extrusion, calcination, etc. A combination of experiments and computer models will be used to improve the understanding and performance of the unit operations used to make catalysts. This knowledge, and the resulting methods and practices, will be transferred to Industrial partners to help transform this important segment of the US economy into a science-driven enterprise.

The consortium was founded on October 1, 2003.