Traditionally, fluid mixing and the related multiphase contacting processes have always been regarded as an empirical technology. Many aspects of mixing, dispersing and contacting were related to power draw, but understanding of the phenomena was limited or qualitative at the most.
In particular during the last decade, however, plant operation targets have tightened and product specifications have become stricter. The public awareness as to safety and environmental hygiene has increased. The drive towards larger degrees of sustainability in the process industries has urged for lower amounts of solvents and for higher yields and higher selectivities in chemical reactors. All this has resulted in a market pull: the need for more detailed insights in flow phenomena and processes and for better verifiable design and operation methods.
Developments in miniaturisation of sensors and circuits as well as in computer technology have rendered leaps possible in computer simulation and animation and in measuring and monitoring techniques.
This volume encourages a leap forward in the field of mixing by the current, overwhelming wealth of sophisticated measuring and computational techniques. This leap may be made possible by modern instrumentation, signal and data analysis, field reconstruction algorithms, computational modelling techniques and numerical recipes.
Harry Van den Akker earned his MSc and PhD degrees at Eindhoven University of Technology, Netherlands, in 1974 and 1978, respectively, and joined the Royal/Dutch Shell Laboratories, Amsterdam (KSLA) in 1977. In 1988, he was appointed Full Professor of Transport Phenomena in the Kramers Laboratorium voor Fysische Technologie of Delft University of Technology. From 2002 until 2011, Van den Akker was Department Head of the Multi-Scale Physics Dept. within the Delft Faculty of Applied Sciences. In the early 2000s, he was visiting Professor at King’s College, University of London, UK. In 2012, he spent a short sabbatical at Princeton University and, in 2018, he was the visiting Burgers Professor at the University of Maryland. In September 2013, Van den Akker was appointed Bernal Professor of Fluid Mechanics at the University of Limerick, Ireland.
Van den Akker has supervised the work of some 35 PhD students and over 200 MSc students at Delft, and mentored 7 assistant professors, 4 of whom became Full Professor. He is publishing in the top chemical engineering and fluid mechanics journals. According to Web of Science, he has published 135 peer reviewed journal articles which were cited almost 4000 times, resulting in an h-index of 33. Van den Akker is focusing on experimental and computational fluid mechanics and mixing, mainly in the laminar and turbulent multi-phase flow field among which bubbly flows, emulsions, suspensions, and pneumatic transport.
In 2013, his 1999 paper (with Dr Jos Derksen) in AIChE Journal on lattice Boltzmann simulations of a stirred vessel was selected by the North American Mixing Forum (NAMF) as one of the 21 most influential contributions to the field of mixing (since 1940). Van den Akker received the 2011 Master Teacher Award for Excellence in Research & Teaching at Delft University. In 2015, he was awarded the 2015 BHR Group Lifetime Recognition Award in Mixing by the ‘Working Party on Mixing’ of the European Federation of Chemical Engineers.
