The dedication that. Professor Gupta had for the welfare of chemical ... medal for the best graduating student. He obtained his master's degree in 1970 and his ...
Santosh K. Gupta: Professor Extraordinaire and Inspiration to Several Generations This issue is in honor of Professor Santosh K. Gupta of the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur (IITK) for his lifelong contributions to several fields of research involving polymers and for serving as an inspiration to generations of undergraduate and graduate students. The dedication that Professor Gupta had for the welfare of chemical engineering education and polymer research in India has been exemplary. Professor Gupta studied at IITK, recognized today as a center of academic excellence. He graduated at the head of the entire engineering class in 1968, earning a Bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering. For this achievement, he was awarded the President of India’s gold medal for the best graduating student. He obtained his master’s degree in 1970 and his doctorate in 1972 working with Professor William Forsman at the University of Pennsylvania. After a one-year post-doc with Professor Forsman, he returned to IITK in Fall 1973 as an assistant professor of chemical engineering. He was promoted to full professor in 1980. He served as Head of the Department of Chemical Engineering at IITK from 1987 to 1989. In 1987, he was the recipient of the Herdillia Award of the Indian Institute of Chemical Engineers for excellence in basic research in chemical engineering. He has been elected Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences, Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, India and Fellow of the Indian National Academy of Engineering. He was the Larsen and Toubro chair at IIT Bombay from 2009 to 2010. He is currently member of the editorial boards of the International Journal of Chemical Reaction Engineering and the Journal of Polymer Engineering (UK). In the past, he has been a member of the editorial board of Transactions of the Indian Institute of Chemical Engineers. He has authored or coauthored six textbooks and edited two books, in addition to authoring more than 190 peer-reviewed journal papers. Professor Gupta’s earlier research interests were centered around polymer rheology and polymer statistical mechanics. One of us (RKG) took his polymers course during the spring semester of 1975. RKG distinctly remembers the excitement that Professor Gupta generated among the students by his enthusiasm for and mastery of the subject. At the time Professor Gupta and his colleague, Professor Anil Kumar, were writing their book entitled, ‘‘Fundamentals of Polymer Science and Engineering.’’ Although Professor Gupta continued to publish papers on rheology and polymer physical properties, he soon gravitated towards polymer reaction engineering. He made significant contributions to the literature on step-growth polymerization reaction engineering, optimization of polymerization reactors and process simulation. This research led to the 1987 book with Anil Kumar, entitled, ‘‘Reaction Engineering of Step Growth Polymerization’’ published by Plenum Press.
DOI 10.1002/pen.22141 Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com). C 2011 Society of Plastics Engineers V
POLYMER ENGINEERING AND SCIENCE—-2011
Polymer reaction engineering is considered to be a mature field today. Indeed, most present-day polymers had already been synthesized and their reaction mechanisms investigated by the 1970s. Much of the fundamental work was due to the efforts of Nobel laureate Paul Flory. One of the established facts was the equal reactivity hypothesis for modeling of irreversible condensation polymerization in batch reactors, whose consequences were verified by definitive experiments. This allowed for the straightforward calculation of the time dependence of the conversion which appears in expressions for quantities of interest such as the number-average and weight-average molecular weight. In 1977 Professor Gupta and his collaborators questioned this entrenched belief and published a paper in Polymer (volume 18, pages 851-852) entitled, ‘‘Rate of condensation polymerization for monomers having reactivities different from their polymers.’’ Their work was greeted with a certain amount of skepticism. In 1981, they published another paper on the same lines of thought in the same journal (volume 22, pages 1699-1704) but on a very complex system employing five rate constants and entitled, ‘‘Modeling of resole type phenol formaldehyde polymerization.’’ With time, their work was accepted, and these papers came to represent the beginning of a fifteen-year journey on the study of unequal-reactivity in the analysis of step-growth polymerizations. Although the initial work focused on general understanding using model polymer systems, the research quickly shifted to very detailed kinetic modeling and optimization of step growth polymerization in industrial reactors. Thus, reversibility was considered in, ‘‘Modeling of a reversible batch PET reactor’’ that was published in the Journal of Applied Polymer Science (volume 27, pages 4421-4438) in 1982. A later paper in 1998 in the same journal (volume 70, pages 1859–1876) and entitled, ‘‘A general kinetic model for epoxy polymerization,’’ analyzed a more complex system. Indeed, all industrially-important condensation polymers were studied including polyesters, polyamides, phenolics, epoxies, polyimides and polyphenylene oxide. It became imperative to Professor Gupta that while modeling and simulation are useful, the kinetic schemes proposed should be validated by experiments. To achieve this objective, Professor Gupta and his students built equipment and collected data on the systems that he already analyzed theoretically. He also collaborated with industry, particularly in the case of batch and semi-batch polymerization of nylon 6. These studies yielded reliable values of the parameters and rate constants appearing in the theoretical models which were then employed for controlling and improving the operation of industrial polymerization reactors. Some of his recent work focused on a population balance approach to simulate the entrapment and growth of gas bubbles during agitated polymerizations, an important aspect in the design of polymerization reactors. He also utilized the very-efficient bio-mimicked jumping-gene and altruistic adaptations of the multiobjective elitist algorithm, NSGA-II for optimization of industrial reactors. Professor Gupta achieved all these while living most of his life in a still-evolving Indian academic system. There, much of the onus to generate good competitive ideas was left to professors who were capable of also producing good-quality undergraduate students. For the first fifteen years of his tenure at IITK, Professor Gupta worked with exceptionally bright undergraduate students and obtained research publications from their senior theses. This would have been laudatory in today’s U.S. with the very recent focus on research experience for undergraduates, although Professor Gupta began providing training to undergraduate students in research almost three decades ago. To date, he has supervised at least 46 published BS theses, 69 MS theses and 10 Ph.D.s. Some of the BS and MS theses were done at the University of Notre Dame, National University of Singapore, University of Wisconsin, and IIT Bombay during visiting appointments. He has shown how one can contribute to graduate education by focusing on research training of undergraduates alone - most of the undergraduates that Professor Gupta supervised in research ended up being graduate students in the U.S. The papers in this special issue of Polymer Engineering and Science have been contributed by several former students, research associates and friends from academia and industry who enjoyed their long-term association with Professor Gupta. He is clearly ‘‘Professor Extraordinaire,’’ having had a significant influence on the careers of not only those whose names appear in this volume but also of many others who were fortunate to come into contact with him. All of us are thankful to him for his encouragement, dedication to the welfare of his students and his help during almost forty years of service and are happy to contribute these articles as a token of our appreciation. Rakesh K. Gupta West Virginia University Sadhan C. Jana University of Akron Ajay K. Ray University of Western Ontario
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DOI 10.1002/pen
