This electronic textbook is a student-contributed open-source text covering the materials used in our chemical engineering capstone design courses at Northwestern. The goal of this project is to provide the greater chemical engineering community with a useful and relevant resource on chemical process design methods and case studies. This project...
Since their introduction nearly a century ago, protein vaccines and therapeutics have revolutionized our ability to prevent and treat human disease. However, existing production processes for biopharmaceuticals are technically complex and rely on living cells, which necessitates highly centralized manufacturing in large-scale production facilities, specialized equipment, and cold-chain distribution. With...
Complex fluids are ubiquitous, from natural materials to manufactured products. Understanding their behavior under flow is vital for engineering these materials. Extensional flow, despite being industrially relevant and often producing dominant impacts upon complex fluids, is an underserved topic compared to shear flow due to a lack of reliable apparatuses...
Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) are a class of nanoporous materials with highly tunable pore shape and chemistry. They are synthesized in a "building block" approach to form crystalline porous materials, which have been explored for diverse applications including gas storage and separations. Given the enormous size of the MOF design space,...
Biomass has the potential to be our country’s leading renewable source of energy. Specifically, fast pyrolysis is a promising method for the conversion of biomass to valuable fuels and chemicals. Given that fast pyrolysis has a residence time of about two seconds, computational methods are particularly useful in obtaining product...
Supported transition metal oxides are an important class of catalysts with a wide range of industrially relevant applications. However, commonly used synthesis techniques to prepare these catalysts often result in a complex mixture of surface species. This inhomogeneity makes it difficult to understand what specific structures might be responsible for...
Organismal development depends upon countless cell decisions to adopt particular fates at the appropriate time and place. These decisions are executed by systems of biochemical reactions called regulatory networks. Elucidating the general principles underlying the structure and function of these networks is vital to understanding all developmental processes, as well...
This thesis centers around the development and application of novel high throughput lithography tools. These advances help: 1) establish the field of nanocombinatorics, where massive libraries (termed megalibraries) of materials can be prepared in a positionally encoded manner and then screened for functional activity, and 2) advance stereolithographic 3D printing...
Currently, platelet transfusions, possessing profound clinical importance in the clotting of blood and healing of wounds, are entirely derived from human volunteer donors. This approach is limited by a 5-day shelf life, the potential risk of contamination, and differences in donor/recipient immunology. In vivo, platelets are formed when bone marrow...
Metal nanoparticles supported on oxides are versatile systems. Ordered arrays of multimetallic nanoparticles of different sizes and surface densities can be synthesized using block copolymer-mediated nanolithography techniques. Metal nanoparticles on planar supports like silica can be utilized for catalyst discovery. Under reaction conditions and at high temperatures, the changing surface...