Illinois Tech Mourns the Passing of Professor Emeritus Dimitri Gidaspow

Distinguished Professor Emeritus Dimitri Gidaspow (Ph.D. GT ’62), a prolific and innovative chemical engineering researcher and teacher, passed away on January 9, 2023, at the age of 88. 

With decades of research and teaching at Illinois Institute of Technology, Gidaspow is known as “one of the most well-remembered and well-loved faculty members at the university.”  

“The computational fluid dynamics approach to fluidization and fluid particle research would not be at the stage of progress it is at today without the extraordinary and outstanding research contribution from Dr. Gidaspow throughout the last 40 years,” says Henry R. Linden Professor of Engineering Hamid Arastoopour.  

Colleagues say Gidaspow was a very kind man with a high level of honesty and integrity. He loved his research, and he went out of his way to help his students.

Gidaspow was proud to have supervised 52 Ph.D. candidates over the course of his career. He received 10 patents, wrote four books and more than 200 publications, and he had close to 20,000 citations. 

His research combined creativity with intuition and ingenuity to employ advanced tools in mathematical modeling and numerical simulations. Gidaspow’s computational efforts throughout his career resulted in significant progress in the predictive methodology using the kinetic theory for fluidized bed systems.

Gidaspow also methodically devised experimental systems to verify these expressions, as well as other important computational fluid dynamics (CFD) parameters. He effectively used CFD principles to describe the dynamic features in flow regime transitions of fluidization. 

He was one of a handful of researchers in the CFD community who was successful in simulating industrial-scale multiphase flow energy conversion and chemical processing systems. Gidaspow’s contribution to the research and education of fluidization and fluid particle systems was extraordinary, and his work has had a huge impact in shortening the gap between lab-scale research and commercial processes.

Gidaspow requested that in lieu of flowers, memorials may be made to support the Dimitri Gidaspow Endowed Fellowship Fund at Illinois Tech to help provide financial assistance to graduate students or the Cancer Research Institute in Memory of Dimitri Gidaspow.