Danckwerts Annual Award lecture at the AIChE Annual Meeting
Friday 7 January 2011
The 2010 Danckwerts lecture was given in November at the AIChE Annual Meeting in Salt Lake City by the President of ISIE, and Emeritus Professor in the Centre for Environmental Strategy, Roland Clift. The title of the lecture, whose text will be published in “Chemical Engineering Science”, was “Chemical Engineering Outside the Pipe: Industrial Ecology and Sustainability”.
Roland interprets this as significant recognition for industrial ecology: “The previous Danckwerts lecturers have all been more-or-less conventional chemical engineers. The fact I was invited to give the 2010 Danckwerts lecture means that the chemical engineering community has recognised not just the existence but the significance of industrial ecology.” The lecture was “concerned with explaining the emerging field of Industrial Ecology and why it represents a new and important area for application of the skills of the chemical engineer... Chemical engineering principles can be applied to managing material and energy flows and transformations in an economy or an industrial sector or a company – i.e. to industrial ecology – as much as to flows and transformations in pipes and vessels.”
Industrial ecology is, of course, much more “than chemical engineering outside the pipe” but the enthusiastic reception of the lecture confirms that this is a good way to explain what we do to the chemical engineering community.
Click here for coverage of Roland’s lecture on the AIChE blog.
The international chemical engineering community has an annual award lecture, the Danckwerts lecture, named to commemorate Peter V. Danckwerts who was the second professor of chemical engineering at the University of Cambridge, founding editor of the journal “Chemical Engineering Science”, and originator of some of the theoretical approaches which are central to chemical engineering (including residence time theory, which has applications in material flow accounting). The lecture is sponsored by the European Federation of Chemical Engineering (EFCE), the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) and Elsevier (publishers of Chemical Engineering Science).
Roland Clift