Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering Presents The 2018 Ralph Peck Lecture

Dr. Marianthi Ierapetritou, Professor and Chair

Department of Chemical and Biochemical Engineering
Rutgers University

ABSTRACT

Simulations are widely used in engineering and scientific disciplines to describe realistic and complex systems and interactions. Computational advances over the last decades have enabled process analysis and optimization simulations, leading to the best economic, environmentally friendly, and safe solutions. However, optimizing computationally expensive computer simulations presents multiple challenges.

In pursuing a more realistic description of reality, computer simulations become computationally very expensive, leading to interesting decision-making problems where information is limited. Surrogate modeling allows us to build lower fidelity models that approximate the original simulation utilizing limited data. Surrogate modeling has been an active area of research over the past two decades, and several techniques exist in the literature. This talk will briefly introduce widely used surrogate modeling techniques such as Kriging and radial basis functions. Ideas for efficiently building surrogate models utilizing adaptive sampling approaches will also be discussed. Finally, a general approach will be presented to deal with this problem, and case studies describing different engineering problems will be used to illustrate the suitability of such a framework based on the work done in our lab for the last 10 years.
BIOGRAPHY
Marianthi Ierapetritou is a Professor and Chair of the Department of Chemical and Biochemical Engineering at Rutgers University in Piscataway, New Jersey. She obtained her BS from National Technical University in Athens, Greece (magma cum laude), her PhD from Imperial College (London, UK) in 1995, and subsequently completed postdoctoral research at Princeton University (Princeton, NJ) before joining Rutgers University in 1998. Prof. Ierapetritou’s expertise is in the area of process systems engineering. Her research interests consider the development of methodologies for the efficient modeling and optimization of process design and operations problems. She considers a variety of applications of systems engineering, and she currently has activities in the areas of (a) pharmaceutical manufacturing, (b) biomass conversion to chemicals, (c) integration of scheduling and control, and (d) supply chain management. She has published over 180 papers and presented at national and international conferences (160 presentations). Among her accomplishments are the Teaching Excellence Award this year, voted by the students at Rutgers School of Engineering, the Outstanding Faculty Award in 2012, the Rutgers Board of Trustees Research Fellowship for Scholarly Excellence in 2004, and the prestigious NSF CAREER award in 2000. Prof. Ierapetritou is an active member of AIChE, where she is currently the chair of the CAST division, and she has been on the scientific committee of more than 12 international conferences. In 2008 she was the chair of the FOCAPO 5th international conference. She is an active educator both in the classroom, teaching graduate and undergraduate classes in the Chemical Engineering department and as an advisor currently supervising the Ph.D. of 7 students and 1 postdoctoral fellow. She is also currently acting as the president of CACHE. This not-for-profit organization promotes cooperation among universities, industry, and government in developing and distributing computer-related educational aids for the chemical engineering profession.

Reception to follow.