Invited Lecturers

Plenary Lecturers

• Prof. Alina Alexeenko, College of Engineering, Advanced Lyophilization Technology Hub (LyoHUB), Purdue University, USA

Alina Alexeenko is a professor at the School of Aeronautics and Astronautics and Davidson School of Chemical Engineering at Purdue University. She is a founding Co-Director of Advanced Lyophilization Technology Hub – LyoHUB established in 2014 focused on advancing the science and technology of pharmaceutical lyophilization. She received her PhD in Aerospace Engineering from the Pennsylvania State University in 2003 and was a WiSE post-doctoral fellow at University of Southern California from 2004 to 2006. Dr. Alexeenko is an associate fellow of AIAA and chaired Thermophysics Technical Committee in 2016-2018.

Alexeenko’s research is in rarefied gas dynamics, heat and mass transfer process modeling in application to high-altitude aerothermodynamic, spacecraft technologies and pharmaceutical manufacturing. 

She has authored 200+ papers and is a co-inventor on 7 patents. Dr. Alexeenko has been collaborating broadly with industry on design and improvement of pharmaceutical lyophilization equipment and processes since 2008 and the development of NIST-sponsored Lyophilization Technology Roadmap to 2025 and Beyond as well as the first recognized consensus technical standard for pharmaceutical lyophilization issued by ASTM issued in 2022.

 Title of the Plenary Lecture: Nonequilibrium gas flow phenomena in pharmaceutical manufacturing

In this talk we will review nonequilibrium gas flows encountered in several unit process operations typical for biopharmaceutical manufacturing. We will consider the microdroplet condensation and transport encountered in rapid-depressurization freezing process as well as rarefied transport through microporous media and thermal interaction characteristic of drying operations such as spray (freeze) drying and lyophilization, that are commonly used to manufacturing drug substance and drug products, especially for thermally labile large-molecule therapeutics and vaccines. The requirements for molecular models suitable for describing gas flows of water vapor and common non-aqueous solvents will be discussed.

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• Dr. José-Maria Fernandez, Instituto de Estructura de la Materia (IEM), Madrid, Spain

Dr. José M. Fernández is a Research Scientist in the Group of Molecular Fluid Dynamics http://www.iem.csic.es/fismol/fdm/ at the Instituto de Estructura de la Materia IEM-CSIC in Madrid, Spain. His current research interests are fluid dynamics in terms of molecular interactions, and its diagnostics by laser spectroscopy techniques. After completing his PhD from the Universidad Complutense in Madrid, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the National Research Council of Canada in Ottawa, and as assistant Professor at the Universidad Politécnica in Madrid, before joining IEM-CSIC.

His research is based on the use of Raman spectroscopy as a powerful quantitative tool by means of the information contained in the spectral intensity. In the domain of fluid flows, he has applied it to: mapping of density and temperature in supersonic gas jets, including their shock-waves; kinetics of molecular relaxation by inelastic collisions; kinetics of molecular clustering and their structure; crystallization of supercooled liquid micro-jets and micro-droplets. All this was accompanied by the development of original instrumentation, some unique worldwide.

He has co-authored over 60 peer-reviewed papers (h-index 20), mostly in high impact journals in Chemical Physics, Molecular Spectroscopy, Astrophysics, Fluid Mechanics and Materials Science. He has lead and participated in 21 Research Projects funded by Spanish and European public agencies, and lectures regularly at scientific conferences. Since 2014, he is a member of the International Advisory Committee of the International Symposium on Rarefied Gas Dynamics.

 Title of the Plenary Lecture: Raman spectroscopic diagnostics of non-equilibrium gas flows: an account from the molecular scale

Among the optical tools to probe non-equilibrium gas flows, Molecular Spectroscopies are non-intrusive techniques, which rely on the structure of the Quantum-Mechanical energy levels of the gas molecules. Therefore, they can access the population of the energy levels of their internal motions (rotation and vibration), even when those populations deviate from the equilibrium Boltzmann distribution.

Raman spectroscopy is based on a two-photon inelastic light scattering process, and has become a powerful diagnostic technique in gas dynamics of small molecules. In the present scope, its relevant merits are:

• All molecular substances can be probed
• High spatial resolution (microns); leading, in gas flows, to time resolution (nanoseconds)
• Intensity is proportional to the number density in the internal states of the molecules
• Rotational and vibrational motions can be probed with the same instrument

These capabilities can be conveniently exploited to probe non-equilibrium gas flows at the molecular scale, yielding quantitative number densities and populations (which can be converted in favorable cases into temperature), with high spatial and time resolution.

The instruments operating at the Laboratory of Molecular Fluid Dynamics (IEM-CSIC, Madrid) will be described. Examples will be given of Raman mapping of gas jets and shock waves, kinetics of rotational and vibrational relaxation, and of clustering and phase transitions.

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• Dr. Vincent Giovangigli, Centre de Mathématiques Appliquées (CMA), Ecole Polytechnique, Palaiseau, France

Vincent Giovangigli studied at Ecole Normale Supérieure de la rue d'Ulm in Paris from 1978 to 1982. He obtained a PhD in Applied Mathematics in 1982 at University Paris-6 and a Thèse d'état (Habilitation Thesis) in 1988 at University Paris-6.

He is currently CNRS Research Director (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique) at Centre de Mathématiques Appliquées of Ecole Polytechnique. Vincent Giovangigli has been the head of Center of Applied Mathematics at Ecole Polytechnique from 1998 to 2006 and has obtained the Jacques-Louis Lions Prize from the French Academy of Sciences 2011.

His research activities concern the kinetic theory of reacting and nonequilibrium gases, the mathematical analysis of systems of partial differential equations governing complex fluids and the simulation of flows with detailed chemistry and detailed transport.

 Title of the Plenary Lecture: Kinetic theory of reactive flows and their applications

The kinetic theory of reacting mixtures of polyatomic gases is discussed. We investigate in particular the evaluation of multicomponent transport coefficients using convergent iterative techniques. As a first application we study the impact of Soret effect in chemical vapor deposition reactors and laminar flames. The apparition of bulk viscosity effects in relaxation regimes for nonequilibrium fluid models is next discussed as well as the impact of bulk viscosity in fluid mechanics. Recent extension of kinetic theory models to reactive crystal surfaces is also addressed.