Geoffrey Brooks

Professor Geoffrey Brooks (born 9th of November 1962) is a Professor of Engineering at the Swinburne University of Technology. He is an acknowledged expert on the fundamentals of steelmaking but he has also been involved in significant research in non-ferrous metallurgy. He has won major awards for his contribution to these fields from the Association for Iron and Steel Technology (AIST), the Minerals, Metals and Materials Society (TMS) and the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining (IOM3), as well as winning several best paper awards with his co-workers in the field of pyrometallurgy. 
==Background==
Brooks was born in Melbourne in 1962 and spent most of his early life in the outer east of that city. He graduated with a Bachelor of Chemical Engineering from RMIT in 1984, completed a Bachelor of Arts (HPS, Media) from Swinburne Institute of Technology (now Swinburne University of Technology) in 1989 and his PhD in Chemical Engineering from the University of Melbourne (https://www.unimelb.edu.au/) in 1994. Brooks was appointed as a Lecturer in Materials Engineering at the University of Wollongong in 1993, where he worked closely with prominent metallurgist Professor Howard Worner on the use of biomass as a reductant in Ironmaking and the fundamentals of Steelmaking with staff at the Port Kembla Steelworks. In 1997, he had a sabbatical at Carnegie Mellon University, working with Professor Dich Fruehan, where he observed first-hand the experiments of Molleseau , who using X-Ray imaging observed the swelling of iron droplets suspended in a molten slag, which greatly influenced his later work on steelmaking kinetics (see “Research” below). In 2000, he was appointed as an Associate Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at the McMaster University, where he worked closely with Professor Ken Coley and Professor Gordon Irons in the McMaster Steel Research Centre on steelmaking fundamentals and the development of sensors for steelmaking.
In 2004, he returned to Australia and took up a role as Research Scientist at CSIRO, where he led a team in developing a Carbothermic Magnesium process based on supersonic quenching . In 2006, he accepted a position as the Professor of Engineering at Swinburne University of Technology. Brooks has held various senior positions at the University, including Pro-Vice Chancellor, Head of Mathematics and Associate Dean of Research, but research has been the major focus of his time at Swinburne. 
==Research==
Brooks’ most influential research has been on the modelling of steelmaking. He led several research teams working on understanding the interaction of jets and liquids in steelmaking , heat transfer in steelmaking and the kinetics of the major reactions in the steelmaking process. Brooks, working closely with researchers at McMaster University and Swinburne University of Technology, developed the Bloated Droplet Theory of Oxygen Steelmaking. The theory links the kinetics of steelmaking to the observed behaviour that droplets of liquid iron containing carbon “swell” or “bloat” when reacting with a FeO rich slag. Brooks and co-workers claimed that this bloating has a dramatic effect on the kinetics of steelmaking and can explain much of the overall kinetics of the process and the major movement of heat within the process, a claim much debated in the literature. Much of his recent work has emphasized the limits of scrap melting in Oxygen Steelmaking and informing the public about the major issues around the decarbonisation of steel.
==Media recognition==
Brooks has been interviewed on several occasions in the Australian media on matters relating to the Australian Steel industry but also on his research into processing minerals on the moon. He has been a regular contributor to The Conversation commenting on a range of issues relating to the metallurgical industry.
Category:1962 births
Category:People from Melbourne
Category:University of Melbourne alumni
Category:RMIT University alumni
Category:Professors