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June 20, 2019

Pioneering CBE professor Robert Bird co-authors featured article

Written By: Sam Million-Weaver

An article titled “Transport phenomena and thermodynamics: Multicomponent mixtures,” written by Chemical and Biological Engineering Professor Emeritus Robert Byron (Bob) Bird and Associate Professor Ross Swaney was highlighted as an editor’s pick in the February 2019 issue of the research journal Physics of Fluids. Bird, who recently celebrated his 95th birthday, remains a trailblazer in the field; the classic textbook, Transport Phenomena, which he co-authored in 1960 with UW-Madison colleagues Warren Stewart and Edwin Lightfoot, has become an integral component of chemical engineering curricula worldwide. Swaney is an expert in process systems design, modeling and optimization. In the new paper, Bird and Swaney build on their previous work together that revealed unappreciated relations between the equations of transport phenomena and those of thermodynamics in pure fluids, extending the observations to more complex multicomponent mixtures.


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