The PSE group at ÅAU has a strong tradition in applied and basic research where process optimization and control plays a central role.
The activities in Heat Engineering are mainly focused on heat and mass transfer, thermodynamics, fluid mechanics and dynamics in process models. Main research topics are modeling, simulation, and optimization of chemical engineering processes where energy conversion and thermodynamics, heat and mass transfer and fluid mechanics play important roles.
Catalysis, chemical kinetics and chemical reactor modeling which aim at utilization of chemical reactions for industrial production are main research areas in Industrial Chemistry & Reaction Engineering. They deepen the know-how in catalyst development and characterization, in the kinetics and mechanisms of catalytic reactions, in the kinetic analysis of complex chemical reaction networks, as well as in the modeling and optimization of chemical reactors. These research areas form a logical path from reaction mechanism to reactor design, from laboratory synthesis to full-scale production. The research is done mainly within the PCC group which is a National Centre of Excellence granted by the Academy of Finland during the period 2006-2011.
The central Process Control topics studied by the group include the development of optimal and robust control theory for digital control, methods for modeling and control of nonlinear and poorly defined processes.
The research activities in Process Design and Systems Engineering are in the field of process and production optimization, bioprocess engineering, environmental engineering as well as energy technology. The research in the area of process and production optimization is focused on numerical methods for solving general classes of mixed-integer non-linear programming (MINLP) problems with applications in process synthesis and production planning. In the field of environmental engineering and energy technology, research interests are in gas cleaning and alternative energy production. Gasification of organic matter in supercritical water is a topic of special research interest.