The Center for Molecular & Engineering Thermodynamics
Established in the Spring of 1992 as a research unit within the University of Delaware's Department of Chemical Engineering, the Center for Molecular and Engineering Thermodynamics (CMET) serves as a focal point stimulating collaborative experimental and theoretical research and encouraging the development of new educational materials in all areas of thermodynamics.
CMET's six faculty members, Professors Eric Furst (Director of CMET), Abraham Lenhoff, Stanley Sandler, Norman Wagner from the Department of Chemical Engineering and Professor Robert Wood from the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, bring together a wide range of theoretical and experimental capabilities in thermodynamics, separation processes, simulations and environmental engineering. Professors Doug Doren in Chemistry and Biochemistry and Krzysztof Szalewicz in Physics bring expertise in computational chemistry and quantum mechanics.
CMET's graduate students, many of whom hold NSF, NASA and other nationally competitive fellowships, are an integral part of the Center's research team. In addition, CMET's researchers include post doctoral fellows and research professionals who bring experience and expertise from leading scientific institutions around the world.
Recent advances in experimental methods that directly probe molecular phenomena have greatly expanded the role of molecular thermodynamics in chemical engineering research, and these techniques are increasingly being adopted to address a wide variety of contemporary issues such as environmental problems, the purification of pharmaceuticals and biological materials, and new separations technologies. Theoretical and experimental research at the Center for Molecular and Engineering Thermodynamics addresses these and other fundamental areas. CMET's laboratories include facilities for characterizing properties of micellar solutions, the measurement of infinite dilution activity coefficients (for example, pollutants in aqueous solutions), measurement of vapor-liquid, vapor-liquid-liquid and liquid-liquid equilibria over a large range of temperature and pressure including at supercritical extraction conditions, the measurement of protein and bacteria separations in aqueous two-phase systems, studies of new chromatographic separations techniques, and calorimetric measurements over wide ranges of temperature and pressure. The Center's theoretical research areas include ab-initio quantum mechanics calculations, Monte Carlo and molecular dynamics simulation and statistical mechanics, the development of new applied thermodynamics methods for equations of state and activity coefficients models, and the description of surfactant and micellar solutions.
CMET faculty, students and post doctoral scientists carry out their research in collaboration with and through the support of industrial and governmental sponsors. Current Center funding includes several multi-year grants from the National Science Foundation, the US Department of Energy, NASA, the National Institutes of Health and the Delaware Research Partnership Fund as well as a large contingent of industrial contracts, with budgets totaling over $6 million. Importantly, CMET also receives direct support from its industrial sponsors, which, among other things, helps to enable the purchase and maintenance of state-of-the-art laboratory equipment.
The Center for Molecular and Engineering Thermodynamics welcomes inquiries from prospective students, researchers and sponsors.