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Professor
RC Darton
Department
of Engineering Science
University
of Oxford
Parks
Road
Oxford
OX1 3PJ
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Tel
01865-273117
Fax
01865-283273
email richard.darton@eng.ox.ac.uk
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Research Interests
I am interested in the concept of Sustainable Development, and how it can
be applied to change the way we do things. It is important to be able to
measure the sustainability of processes, projects and products, which means
looking at impacts in the environmental, social and economic domains. I have
been working on measuring tools, particularly Sustainability Indicators and
Metrics, and how they can be chosen in particular cases. We have been studying
palm oil production (an agricultural process), and the UK car fleet
(essentially a service) to develop and test these methods. In November 2005 I
gave the Hartley
lecture at the Royal Society on the subject of Sustainability Metrics.
My other research interests
include dynamic surface effects at gas/liquid interfaces. We have been looking
at the adsorption of surfactant at expanding liquid surfaces using an overflowing
cylinder apparatus to examine Marangoni stresses. We have looked
at the adsorption of surfactants at the surfaces of liquid jets,
at exposure times down to a few milliseconds, which again reveals some
interesting Marangoni effects. We have various research projects looking at
foam - how it is stabilised, and how to measure it, in surfactant and
biological systems, how to destroy it when it is unwanted, and how to use it in
foam fractionation. We have a project looking at the use of biological systems
to produce surfactant. Searching for ways to measure and characterise foams we
developed optical tomography, as a way of recording cellular structures. Some
of these structures can be viewed.
There is also a stereo
movie of a rotating bubble (needs viewing through red/green spectacles).
I am interested in aspects of
water treatment, and am currently working on the problems of oestrogen
in treated water. There is evidence that conventional treating plants can
be engineered to remove oestrogens to a significant extent (tce article).
My other interests include
distillation and absorption, particularly the aspects of mass transfer and
hydrodynamics.
A list of papers illustrates my interests over the
years.
Chemical Engineering at Oxford
The Department of Engineering Science initiated teaching in chemical
engineering in 1992. I have taught distillation and other separation
processes, chemical thermodynamics, and process design and economics, as
well as courses on Sustainable Development and Energy.
The Institution of Chemical Engineers
The Oxford undergraduate course is accredited by the Institution of Chemical Engineers. I am a member of
IChemE's Sustainability Subject Group and the Fluids Separations Subject Group, and past-Chairman of the European Federation of Chemical Engineering Working Party on
Separation Processes. In 2008/9 I was President of the Institution of Chemical
Engineers.
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Some personal history
I graduated as a Chemical engineer from the University
of Birmingham in 1970. I then did research for five years in the Department
of Chemical Engineering at Cambridge, working on fluidisation and particulate
systems, after which I joined Royal Dutch/Shell, as a research engineer at
the laboratory in Amsterdam. Various jobs with Shell followed, both at
Amsterdam and the Hague, where I was concerned with distillation design and
trouble-shooting, with gas treating, and with a wide range of general
chemical engineering problems. Lastly I was manager of the chemical
engineering development group of Shell International Chemicals, in the
Hague.
In 1991 I returned to the UK, to the University of
Oxford, to help set up the new course in chemical engineering, within the Department of
Engineering Science. In 1999 I
was Stephen Anderman visiting lecturer at Mendeleev University and Kurnakov
Institute, Moscow, and the next year at the University of St Petersburg. From
July to September 2001 I held a
Royal Academy of Engineering: Engineering Foresight Award at the University
of Sydney, where I worked with Prof Jim Petrie and developed some ideas about
sustainability metrics. This was a brilliant introduction to Australasia, and
in 2003 I returned as the first “University of Canterbury visiting Oxford
Fellow”, at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch (NZ). I am a Fellow of
Keble College which you
can see in the background of the picture at the top of this page. In 2000 I
was elected an honorary member of the Czech Society of Chemical Engineers,
and to the Royal Academy of Engineering, and to a Professorship in
Engineering Science.
From 2004 to 2009 I was Head of the Department of
Engineering Science, which was a very busy period, with many new buildings,
new appointments and other developments. The Department celebrated its
Centenary in 2008 with a number of events including a splendid Garden Party
for Alumni, which was held at Keble College.
From 2000 to 2005 I was a Vice-President of the Institution of Chemical
Engineers, responsible for Qualifications (membership and accreditation)
issues. In May 2007 I was elected Deputy-President, and then President for
the year 2008-2009.In 2010 I will become President of the European Federation
of Chemical Engineering, for a two year term of office. The Federation
represents some 150 000 engineers in around 40 countries of Europe.
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