Fluidization: In Honor of Kunii and Levenspiel I (Invited Talks)

It would be hard to find a chemical engineer that is unaware of Octave Levenspiel. Most of us knew him through his book “Chemical Reaction Engineering,” which was a revised version of his “Omni Book.” Of all the chemical reactors, Octave was most intrigued by fluidized bed reactors. He even wrote a popular book on this topic entitled, Fluidization Engineering. His research provided the groundwork for mathematically describing a fluidized bed reactor based on the fundamental properties of bubble hydrodynamics. It was the start of where we are today. Prof. Daizo Kunii is best known as one of the coauthors of the popular textbook entitled, Fluidization Engineering. Daizo was fascinated with heat transfer in static and dynamic granular media. His research explored the fundamental aspects of heat transfer in soil, packed beds, and fluidized beds, gasifiers (specifically the gasification of solid waste or the Pyrox process). This session is dedicated to the memory and legacy of Prof. Octave Levenspiel (1926 - 2017) and Prof. Daizo Kunii (1923 - 2019) with papers by invitation that cover but are not limited to reactor modeling and applications of fluidized beds derived from fundamental flow principles.