Editor’s Preface

Editor’s Preface

It is my great honor and privilege to be invited by the Editor-in-Chief to write an Editor’s Preface for the KONA Powder and Particle Journal No. 39. As mentioned by Prof. Brij M. Moudgil, the recent issues continue the tradition of presenting high quality review articles and original research papers. KONA is also reaching out to an ever-expanding cadre of researchers as illustrated by the diversity of discipline represented by the authors of the articles, thereby continuing to serve academic and industrial researchers from physical sciences to engineering and beyond.

As an international researcher who serendipitously entered this field and subsequently played a pivotal role as a sort of bridge between Thailand and Japan, I was greatly honored with an Imperial Decoration ‘the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays with Neck Ribbon’ in Autumn 2016. Started over a half century ago, my relationship and involvement in powder/particle science and technology (or PST) encompass the establishment of the Thai Powder Technology Center with a strong support from Japan (Association of Powder Process Industry and Engineering; Society of Powder Technology) in 1992, followed by Center of Excellence in Particle Technology, both in Faculty of Engineering, Chulalongkorn University (CU) and the establishment of Thailand’s NANOTEC (National Nanotechnology Center) in 2003 affiliated with National Science and Technology Development Agency. In retrospect, my serendipitous first brush with PST happened when I was an RA/PhD student in Prof. David M. Himmelblau’s Lab, University of Texas at Austin from 1973–1978, and a Dr. Chikao Kanaoka, Kanazawa University (KZU), Japan, came to his Lab for 2 years as visiting scientist to carry out experimental research in atmospheric aerosol engineering. After graduation in late 1978, I immediately joined the Chemical Engineering Dept. of Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok and was persuaded by Dr. Kanaoka to apply for a short-term JSPS (Japan Society for the Promotion of Science) Fellowship to carry out research collaboration with him in Prof. Hitoshi Emi’s Lab, KZU, in 1980. Starting essentially from scratch, in only 3 months I managed to develop, code, validate and simulate an innovative computer model for the stochastic convective diffusional deposition and dendritic growth of submicron aerosol particles on a single fiber using the Monte-Carlo method. It was deemed the first practical computer model of its kind as the random movement of submicron particles was governed by Brownian motion and the Langevin equation that was known to take a large amount of CPU time even on a supercomputer to simulate straight-forwardly without applying practical insight of Brownian diffusion to transform and simplify the equation.

As widely recognized globally, especially in the developed countries, powder/particle science and technology in Thailand has also played key roles in her industries and society, including environmental protection and human life well-being. For example, researchers of NANOTEC and their collaborators are active in developing and applying nanoparticle technology, including nanoencapsulation and nanosensors, to drug delivery and medical diagnosis (screening and monitoring) of diabetes, cervical cancer and breast cancer. Recently first-principle models and computer simulation of complex powder processing equipment have taken root in leading Thai industrial plants, including SCG Chemicals (SCGCh) where I am a full-time technology advisor, thanks to the availability of advanced software on CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) and DEM (Discrete Element Method) in tandem with high-performance computers as well as cloud computing.

Incidentally, I recently had an opportunity to fully participate over five weeks in an Autonomous Systems AI Architect Training Workshop offered by SCGCh’s collaborator Microsoft. Based upon AI (more specifically, deep reinforced learning of AI machine learning coupled with availability of plant big data), a well-designed autonomous system should enable real-time optimization and control (RTOC) of large-scale chemical process plants, including powder/particle ones, in the foreseeable future. Currently, the insurmountable limitations of using reliable first-principle modeling of machinery and process equipment to simulate a large-scale petrochemical plant (which inevitably requires a huge amount of CPU time, thereby causing significant real time delay) in conjunction with huge collections of historical plant operational datasets (which generally suffer from lacking of diversity of wide-ranging operating conditions and reflect mostly steady-state non-dynamic conditions) have rendered the current implementation of plant-wide RTOC technically infeasible. However, a practical solution would be to develop and validate the necessary dynamic first-principle models of the whole process plant with the aid of decade-long historical plant data that include process disturbances and interruptions; then simulate the validated dynamic plant model to generate detailed dynamic responses to millions of different operational scenarios, including process disturbances and parametric uncertainty. Next an appropriately designed autonomous AI system is employed off-line to train itself using the generated big data and come up with reasonably reliable correlations between process inputs/parameters and the corresponding state variables/outputs. The derived correlations would next be used in place of the dynamic first-principle plant model to efficiently carry out timely plant-wide RTOC. The beauty of the AI methodology is that, even after the actual implementation of the RTOC, the autonomous system can continue to automatically learn and refine the existing correlations by making good use of the newly observed plant data. Though a dynamic powder processing system/plant is generally more complicated than a typical chemical plant, I believe that a similar, or perhaps some more innovative, AI methodology would be applicable to the implementation of RTOC of powder processing plants in the not too distant future. Last but not least, I look forward to the advent of articles related to AI and its applications to powder/particle science and technology in future issues of KONA Powder and Particle Journal.

Wiwut Tanthapanichakoon

Asian / Oceanian Editorial Board

June 13, 2021