ChE faculty holds lectures

Dr. Leonila Abella of the Chemical Engineering Department delivered her inaugural professorial chair lecture at the Ariston Estrada Seminar Room last December 11. Her lecture was on the liquid phase dehydration of tert-Butyl alcohol catalyzed by ion exchange resins.

Abella’s training and research is on heat transfer, reactive distillation and catalysis. She undertook training on these areas in the Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique in Lille, France, the Tokyo Institute of Technology, and the Nagoya University in Japan. At present, she is involved in a research project on environmental catalysis focused on methane reforming using carbon dioxide.

On the other hand, Dr. Armando Quitain, a visiting professor from the Chemical Engineering Department of Toyohashi University, Japan gave a lecture on the topic “Sub-and Supercritical Water and its Application to Waste Resources Recovery.”

The lecture was held at the Science and Technology Research Center on November 23. Quitain was a member of the ChE Department before he pursued his postgraduate studies at the Nagoya University in Japan through the Mombusho Scholarship grant.

ME links with Japanese University

Last December 6, Professor Yasuki Nakayama of Tokai University in Japan visited the Mechanical Engineering Departmentand presented a brief lecture on the progress of visualization as applied to various phenomena such as flow, heat, and sound. His visit was to establish links with Filipino professors who specialize in fluid mechanics prior to the holding of the Asian Symposium on Visualization in Manila.

Nakayama is President of Future Technology Research Institute in Tokyo, Japan, and co-author of Introduction to Fluid Mechanics, a 1999 Butterworth-Heinemann publication.

In another development, Godofredo Salazar and Gerardo Augusto of the Mechanical Engineering Department attended the 5th Annual Seminar-Conference on Mini-Hydro Development sponsored by the Philippine Association of Small Scale Hydropower, Inc. (PASSHYDRO) and the Department of Energy on December 5-6 at Hyatt Regency Hotel. The conference theme was “Mini-Hydro for Countryside Development and Environmental Protection.”

Salazar presented his paper entitled “The Micro-Hydro Project in Abra: Its Innovation and Impact to the Upland Community.” He is the team leader of the Abra Micro-Hydro Project in the university.