When he came to Washington University, Dudukovic was excited about the prospects of collaborating with School of Medicine researchers. Almost immediately, however, his department chair called him in and steered him elsewhere. He speaks in a deep, pleasant, eastern-European accent that is at once strong and kind. The chair wanted me to concentrate on reaction engineering, and I applied myself very hard to that, because that is the core of chemical engineering. Reaction engineering involves understanding how chemical reactions happen, at what speed and rate they happen, the analysis of molecular change from one form to another in various environments, and determining what kind of equipment to use to conduct those reactions.
Heat plays a major role in chemical reactions, as does the phase of materials.
To get it in that form requires transforming materials chemically and physically, and that's what we chemical engineers do. Forty-one industrial CREL sponsors from 24 companies attended the CREL annual meeting this past fall to participate in lectures, poster presentations and discussions of future research directions. Bayer Inc. The consortium draws such wide support in large part because Dudukovic is a leading figure in multiphase reactors, extremely complex systems used by the petrochemical and chemical industries. These techniques in tandem are not in use at any other reaction engineering laboratory in the world. Dudukovic has been active in environmental studies of nitrogen oxide abatement, oxidation of organics in water, and process safety and waste minimization through reactor redesign.