Congratulations to the team led by Professor Erich Muller which just won the 9th Industrial Fluid Properties Simulation Challenge!

A team led by Professor Erich Muller has just won the 9th Industrial Fluid Properties Simulation Challenge. The challenge involved predicting the interfacial tension of water/oil mixtures at high pressures and temperatures, conditions at which there were no published data.

The team composed of Carmelo Herdes, Åsmund Ervik, Andrés Mejía and Erich Muller came ahead of seven of the best modelling teams in the world by employing the SAFT coarse grained force fields developed within the Molecular Systems Engineering group at Imperial. Results were disclosed on November 13th at the meeting of the AIChE in San Francisco.

Herdes was a PDRA in the MSE group and is now a Lecturer at the University of Bath. Ervik was a PhD student in the MSE group and is now a researcher at SINTEF, Norway. Mejía is a visiting researcher at Imperial and has a permanent post as a professor in the University of Concepción, Chile.

[Figure: Snapshot of the liquid-liquid interface of an equilibrium configuration of a ternary system: water (blue), toluene (red) and dodecane (green) at 130 °C and 1.825 MPa. The aqueous phase (right hand) is virtually pure water. The organic phase (left) has an appreciable amount of water which will depend on the temperature and composition of said phase.]