Prof. Gregory J McRae

The environment has emerged as one of the critical challenges facing the chemical engineering profession. Research to reduce adverse impacts is being conducted in three areas. The first is a program to enhance our understanding of the physical and chemical processes occurring in the environment. A second area is the development of process design and operating procedures that can incorporate multiple objectives including economic considerations, environment performance, safety, control and product quality. A third theme is the development of chemistries and molecular systems that avoid the occurrence of environmental problems in the first place.

As one illustration of the program, work is currently underway to develop the first regional-scale photochemical air quality model that incorporates scale adaptive solution procedures, aerosol dynamics, and data assimilation. The model will be used to help develop cost effective emissions control strategies.

In the areas of chemical process simulation, design and operation work is proceeding on several fronts. One theme involves the development of very fast process simulation procedures that exploit emerging parallel computing architectures. Particular attention is being given to the direct treatment of uncertainties in the solution and optimization algorithms.

Advances in computational chemistry and the capability to manipulate structures at atomic scales offer the opportunity to design, from first principles, molecules that have the desired physical and chemical properties. Current research is focused on the formulation of combinatorial optimization framework that uses ab initio quantum chemistry, molecular dynamics and direct measurements to evaluate physical properties.

* Development and application of urban, regional and global scale photochemical air pollution models.
* Process design and operation to achieve economic and environmental objectives.
* Combinatorial optimization and process data assimilation.
* Aerosol dynamics and its effects on radiative transfer in the atmosphere.
* Solution, analysis and optimization of nonlinear mathematical models.
* Molecular design and computational chemistry.
* Applications of very high performance computing, high-level language compilers and data visualization.
* Design of cost-effective public policies for environmental problems.


Energy and Environmental Research: In the energy field, McRae is participating in the MIT Coal Study, studying and modeling the processes for improved coal combustion and CO2 capture, and for biomass and biofuels, and looking at risks/benefits/investments for moving these technologies into commercial use. One of McRae's Ph.D. students just finished his thesis on the biomass/biofuels evaluation, and it is in review at present.

McRae is also advising microelectronics fabricators on how to choose chemicals for use in fabs to minimize environmental impact and cost.