CPFD Software has continued our longstanding support of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers‘ (AIChE) Particle Technology Forum (PTF) by sponsoring the PTF Student Poster Awards. CPFD would like to congratulate Krutarth Pandit and Alejandro Gallegos Tovar, winners of the 2025 Student Poster Competition.
Krutarth Pandit is a 3rd-year PhD candidate in Dr. Fan’s lab, specializing in advanced chemical looping technologies for clean energy production. His doctoral research focuses on developing biomass-based pathways for carbon-neutral liquid fuels through a combination of process design optimization, experimental validation, and integrated process modeling.
For the poster session, he presented “Process Analysis and Experimental Study of Biomass-Based Liquid Fuel Generation via Chemical Looping”, showcasing ongoing reactor studies, material characterization, and multi-scale modeling efforts aimed at enabling efficient and sustainable fuel synthesis.
Alejandro Gallegos Tovar is a 5th year Ph. D. candidate in Professor Curtis lab in the department of Chemical Engineering at the University of California, Davis. Alejandro’s research focuses mainly on understanding how particle-scale interactions drive macroscopic flow, from both simulation approaches (CFD, DEM) and experimental approaches. His doctoral research focuses on the effect of roughness on the flowability of granular materials, the effect of fines and process conditions on particle attrition, and the effect of material properties on particle deposition.
During the AIChE 2025 Annual Meeting, Alejandro presented a poster called ‘Effect of Surface Asperities on Particle-Phase Stress’, which highlighted the importance of surface feature distribution on particle flowability.