Sagar Sourav
Profile
Sagar Sourav is a Ph.D. scholar in the Department of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering, Lehigh University. He is doing his research under the guidance of Professor Israel E. Wachs. He is also a Graduate Fellow at Idaho National Laboratory, working with Dr. Rebecca R. Fushimi. He conferred his Master’s degree from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kanpur and Bachelor’s degree from the National Institute of Technology (NIT) Rourkela (both in Chemical Engineering). He also has a short industrial exposure of two years as a Process Engineer in Haldia Petrochemicals Limited.
Areas of Research
Research Experience
Sagar is currently working on the Oxidative Coupling of Methane (OCM) reaction. The objective of this research project is two-fold: To establish the molecular level structure-activity/selectivity understanding under OCM operating conditions and to apply the molecular level insights to rationally design a lower temperature OCM catalyst with higher activity and selectivity for decreased process energy load. He is utilizing various in-situ and operando spectroscopic techniques and Temporal Analysis of Products (TAP) reactor technique to gain molecular-level structural insight of the catalysts under working conditions and OCM reaction pathways. He is also working on Designing Cr-free High-Temperature Water-gas Shift (HT-WGS) catalysts.
For his Master’s thesis, he worked on Phase Behavior of Pluronic F127, where he focused on understanding the Rheological Aspects of the phase transition in aqueous solutions (for the concentration of 20-35 wt% and temperature of 0°-100°C). The knowledge was used to construct a Phase Diagram for the above system. In addition to this, the Gelation Kinetics and the Fractal Dimension associated with the gel structure was also investigated by him.
During his Bachelor’s project, he focused on the Production of Hydrogen enriched Syn-gas through absorption in a packed column. The rate-based non-equilibrium, RateFrac model of ASPEN PLUS simulator was used for theoretical column design. Based on this experience, a lab-scale absorption column was also designed, where CaO was used as absorbent, to obtain hydrogen-enriched syngas.
In addition to the Academic research projects, Sagar has short internship experience in the Steel Authority of India Limited (SAIL) Rourkela and National Aluminium Company (NALCO) Damoanjodi.