This award will support a joint US-France seminar on the topic of "Adsorption Processes for Gas Separation". The organizers of the seminar are: Dr. Douglas Levan, Department of Chemical Engineering, University of Virginia, and Dr. F. Meunier, Laboratoire d'Informatique pour la Mecanique et les Sciences de l'Ingenieur, Orsay, France. Adsorption processes are important in several applications for gas separation. Pressure swing adsorption (PSA) has many small and large scale applications, including air separation, carbon-dioxide/methane separation, hydrogen production, hydrocarbon separation and gas drying. PSA is also expected to play an increasing role in anti-pollution projects, such as the recovery of pollutants from industrial effluents. Research on PSA and the development of PSA is very active in both the US and France. The laboratories of the French National Center for Scientific Research are strongly involved in the field of adsorptive gas separation and French industry is present in the whole chain of scientific and engineering functions (adsorbent preparation, process design and process operation). The joint workshop will bring together experts for an intensive four day workshop on gas separation by adsorption with specific focus on the most recent trends in PSA research and processes. Topics to be discussed are: 1) the materials aspect of adsorbent design 2) methods for the prediction of mass transfer rates of mixtures in adsorbents, 3) the exact role of modeling and numerical simulation in the conception of new processes, and 4) the reliability of predictive models. The results of this workshop should make a valuable contribution to future directions in adsorption process research.
