Thursday Colloquium
Current Applications and Future Opportunities for Interfacial Science in the Energy Industry
Speaker: Girish Rao (Professor of Practice, Department of Chemical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai)
‘Climate Change’ represents one of the biggest challenges in the history of mankind as we need to increase the supply of energy to growing economies and decrease the atmospheric CO2 levels under extreme cost constraints. The technical solutions will be multi-disciplinary but interfacial science will play a critical role in their development. In this seminar a case study of how interfaces are engineered based on fundamental principles and then leveraged to deliver performance in industrial scenarios. This physics could be applied in green hydrogen electrolyzers, which play an important role in India’s Energy Security Strategy. A second case study on how the stability of nano-aggregates (i.e. asphaltenes), present in existing oil products, are measured and how subsequent thermodynamic analysis provides ‘solubility parameter’ estimation for complex hydrocarbon fluids. This approach could be transferred to biofuel stability assessment, which is in a relatively nascent stage
Girish Rao recently (1st April 2025) retired from Shell Technology Centre Bangalore (STCB) where, in a career spanning 18 years, he led teams in product development and exploratory research. Girish was responsible for establishing a number of different “Centres of Expertise” at STCB and recent individual contributions were in the development of a “Complexation Power” method for amine corrosivity, Dielectric Spectroscopy for asphaltenes and a mutagenicity screening tool for heavy oil products.
During a 15 year career with Unilever Research he developed deep skills in interface and colloid science for detergent innovation and was responsible for important innovations for ‘VIM’ Plastic Coating and ‘Pears’ soap.
Girish Rao’s doctoral research (Imperial College, London) was in bioelectrochemistry and in a post-doctoral assignment (UC San Francisco) focused on developing a non-invasive blood glucose measurement tool: the ‘GlucoWatch’ technology.