Support for US Participants for International Conference on Fluidization

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1323192PI: LepekThis proposal will help subsidize travel-related expenses to enable U.S. researchers, particularly early-career researchers such as the PI, to attend and present their research at the Fluidization XIV conference (Fluidization XIV: From Fundamentals to Products) in Noordwijkerhout, The Netherlands (May 25-30, 2013). This proposal will support researchers from U.S. institutions that would normally not have the financial resources necessary to attend this international conference. In addition, this proposal will help support the travel costs of early-career researchers and researchers from traditionally underrepresented groups in the STEM fields that will be recruited to participate in this conference. Fluidization is a very important field of both fundamental research and broad industrial applications. Currently, knowledge of complex fluid-particle interactions, particularly when coupled with multiphase transport phenomena and chemical reactions is still incomplete. This is primarily due to the challenges associated with coupling the solid properties of particles and their hydrodynamic behavior within a moving fluid medium. The addition of heat and mass transfer operations and also chemical reacting systems makes multiphase systems such as fluidized bed reactors a challenge to successfully design, scale-up, and operate. Although fluidized bed reactors are fairly common within the petrochemical industry, they can be found in other industries for a variety of applications such as coating and the design of new materials. Therefore, advances in fluidization research are necessary to help develop and ultimately commercialize new technologies such as CO2 capture (chemical looping), renewable energy systems, nanostructured materials, and the continuous processing of novel coated drug delivery systems. This conference will focus on advances in the field of fluidization research which impact the research and development, as well as the large-scale manufacturing of advanced materials that are common across a wide range of chemical process, life science, and food science industries. This conference will bring together a wide range of scientists and engineers across multiple continents that are focused on fluidization research, which can have a major impact on multiple industries. By bringing together researchers who share a mutual interest in fluidization, it is expected that new international partnerships and collaborations will be established. This will be especially beneficial to the early-career researchers supported by this proposal that will have the unique opportunity to present their recent unpublished research findings in front of a congregation of established international researchers.