SRINIVASAN, Rajagopalan

Associate Professor

PhD (Chem. Eng.) Purdue, 1998
BTech (Chem. Eng.) IIT Madras, 1993

Contact information
Blk E5, 4 Engineering Drive 4, #02-15, Singapore 117576
Tel: (65) 6516 8041    Fax: (65) 6779 1936
Email: chergs@nus.edu.sg

Research Group Home Page: http://www.iace.eng.nus.edu.sg

RESEARCH

Environmentally Benign Process Design

Sustainable processes and products cause minimal impact on the environment, community, and personnel. With deeper understanding of the impacts of manufacturing, the requirements on safety and environmental performance of chemical plants become stricter. In tandem, industry seeks profitable processes that are easy to operate and control. An inherently safe and eco-efficient process avoids hazards and wastes by relying on naturally occurring phenomena and robust design, instead of controlling them through add-on features. While the fundamental concepts of inherent safety and pollution prevention have been developed over the last two decades, they are largely underutilized in practice. In this project, we are developing methods and tools that enable the systematic synthesis, design, and evaluation of benign processes.

Efficient Process Operations

With recent advances in sensors and control technologies, plant operators today are required to monitor and control thousands of ever-changing variables to ensure optimal plant operation – clearly a cognitive challenge. The ante is further raised in the case of agile plants that seek to take advantage of short-term market changes in prices and demands. Effective plant supervision technologies are critical for agile operations. In this project, we are developing novel techniques based on artificial intelligence, multi-variate statistics and signal processing to assist process operators in managing such operations.

Enterprise Wide Optimization

Economic performance of today's enterprises are dominated by the between plant operation and the external world through the supply chain. The essential elements in supply chain management – supplier selection, negotiating contracts, procuring raw materials, inbound and outbound logistics, planning and scheduling production, and reacting to uncertainties – have traditionally been considered in isolation. The difficulty in solving a monolithic formulation that encompasses all the supply chain entities has been the main reason for this. Our research seeks to model, simulate, analyze, controlling, and design integrated supply chains using math programming and agent-based methods.

Computational Systems Biology

Recent advances in the life sciences have motivated the paradigm of biological systems. The understanding of the building blocks of life - DNA, RNA, proteins, cells, and tissues - and their interactions is essential to predicting and preventing diseases. Our research aims to develop computational approaches to the modeling and analysis of biological systems.

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

I. Halim and R. Srinivasan, "Systematic Waste Minimization in Chemical Processes: Part III. Batch Operations", Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research, 45(13), p4693-4705, 2006.

R. Srinivasan and A. Kraslawski, "Application of the TRIZ Creativity Enhancement Approach to Design of Inherently Safer Chemical Processes", Chemical Engineering and Processing, 45 (6), p507-514, 2006.

R. Srinivasan and M Qian, "Offline Temporal Signal Comparison Using Singular Points Augmented Time Warping", Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research, 44(13), p 4697-4716, 2005.

R. Srinivasan, P. Viswanathan, H. Vedam and A. Nochur," A Framework for Managing Transitions in Chemical Plants", Computers & Chemical Engineering, 29 (2), p305-322, 2005.

R. Srinivasan, C. Wang, W. K. Ho and K. W. Lim, "Dynamic PCA Based Methodology for Clustering Process States in Agile Chemical Plants", Industrial and Engineering Chemistry Research, 43 (9), p2123-2139, 2004.