This seminar will challenge you to think differently about engineering, your career, and the world around you.
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Clarkson University
Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering
Seminar
“PERSPECTIVE”
Prof. Ross Taylor
Wednesday, 04/14/2025 at 2:30 pm
CAMP 194
https://clarkson.zoom.us/j/95529580049
Ross Taylor received BSc, MSc, and PhD degrees from the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology in the UK. He was hired sight-unseen by Clarkson University in 1980 because the department was in desperate need of additional faculty. He is now completing his 90th semester at Clarkson.
Ross Taylor and his graduate students showed that processes such as distillation and absorption are better modeled as the rate-based processes they are rather than using the nearly 130-year-old industry standard equilibrium stage model.
The book “Multicomponent Mass Transfer” authored by Taylor and R. Krishna, published by John Wiley & Sons in 1993, has won wide acclaim as an authoritative textbook on this subject and one that has changed the way mass transfer is taught.
Taylor is co-author of the software system ChemSep, which he develops with H.A. Kooijman. The ChemSep package has been used for educational purposes by more than 60 Chemical Engineering Departments around the world, by government laboratories, and by several multinational companies.
Taylor’s approach to separations process modeling has been described in several widely used and cited textbooks and handbooks written by others. Most companies in the business of chemical process simulation have implemented a version of his model for their own use. More than ten such companies (including all of the major players) have found it necessary to market their own independent software implementations of his model.
Taylor’s models and methods – and, in some cases, his software – have been used in the design of some of the largest chemical plants in the world. Most notably, 2 of the 5 largest (and several others in the top 40) LNG (Liquefied Natural Gas) plants were designed, in part, using Taylor’s models.
He served as Chair of the Department of Chemical Engineering from January 1999 to June 2006. For eleven years he simultaneously held a part-time appointment of Professor at Twente University of Technology in Enschede in The Netherlands.
He received the Computing and Chemical Engineering Award from the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) in 2004. An award for Outstanding Contributions to Separations Technology, this time from the Separations Division of the AIChE followed in 2007. In 2020 he was named a Fellow of the AIChE. He has been named the Omega Chi Epsilon Teacher of the Year by Clarkson Chemical Engineering students nine times.