Department of Chemical Engineering, IIT Kanpur

About Department of Chemical Engineering, IIT Kanpur

The Department of Chemical Engineering at IIT Kanpur is ranked among the nation's top schools in Chemical Engineering, and is endowed with a highly competitive undergraduate program, a vibrant graduate program and a distinguished faculty that has earned national and international honors. Aside from excellence in fundamental research, the department has made significant contributions to the chemical industry through its expertise in chemical process engineering, simulation, optimization and control, polymers, interfacial phenomena and separations. Our faculty has published over 30 textbooks and research monographs in the last three decades, and our students have gone on to excel both in chemical industry and academia. The department has been continually adapting and responding to the rapidly changing economic, social and technological scenarios at the national and international levels in the last two years.

There are currently eighteen outstanding faculty members who excel in diverse facets of cutting-edge chemical engineering research, both in traditional areas such as transport phenomena, kinetics and catalysis and polymers, as well as in emerging areas such as bio-informatics, advanced materials, nanotechnology, etc. There are currently 220 undergraduate students in our department studying for B.Tech degree, about 60 M.Tech students and 30 research scholars working towards their PhD. There are eighteen highly trained and motivated technical support-staff members who provide assistance in the development, maintenance and in the smooth functioning of all research and teaching laboratories.

Experimental research in the department is supported by state-of-the-art facilities which include scanning tunneling and atomic force microscopes, ellipsometer, rheometers, high pressure liquid chromatograph, temperature programmed analyzer, etc. IIT Kanpur has been chosen by the Department of Science and Technology (DST) as one among the five places in India to host a state-of-the-art Nano-technology center, which will be located in the Department of Chemical Engineering. Under the auspices of the FIST scheme of DST, a new facility for analyzing the rheology of complex fluids and interfacial phenomena was established. With this facility, it is now possible to probe the dynamics of complex fluids such as polymer melts, solutions and gels, foams, nano-suspensions, etc. The atomic force microscope is being used for probing of pico-Newton forces and characterization of patterns formed in nanoscopic polymer films, which is of direct relevance in maskless nanolithography. A new facility for the measurement of NOx concentration in air over a range between 10 and 10000 ppm by a dedicated chemiluminescence analyzer has been created. A modern computational facility for computer-based control and unit operations for undergraduate students has been created with support from MHRD. This facility is equipped with chemical process simulation software such as ASPEN and HI-SYS, which are used in teaching computer based simulation and design of industrial chemical processes. A computational facility for Gene expression profiling and Gene network analysis is set up with one Itanium server and four Sun workstations.

Several projects of direct industrial importance spanning a wide spectrum of areas are currently underway. For instance, research sponsored by Unilever India, Bangalore, on particulate adhesion and detachment focuses on uncovering the fundamental physico-chemical and interfacial aspects of detergency, with the aim of designing futuristic ultra-efficient detergents. Chevron-Texaco Inc, USA, is sponsoring experimental and computational studies on flow patterns in bubble column reactors, and the development of novel catalysts. GAIL, India, is supporting process intensification studies that can lead to miniaturization of chemical plants similar to the progress witnessed in the microelectronic devices. Two of the technologies developed â Higee separation and adsorptive separation of mixtures â are currently under negotiations for transfer to the industry and for patenting.