Research Facilities

The Chemical Engineering Department occupies one wing of the John Hodgins
Engineering Building. It contains offices, workshops, laboratories and student study
space, serviced research laboratories, and a large-scale unit operations laboratory
used for both research projects and undergraduate teaching labs.

The Faculty of Engineering and the University have invested over $4 million in a
complete renovation of the physical infracstructure of the Department. Phase I,
completed in the summer of 2002, involved the renovation of the polymer reaction
engineering labs to provide new laboratories to support the polymer
research of Drs. Zhu and Thompson, new undergraduate laboratories and renovated
chemical storage facilities. Phase II involves the renovation of the heating and
ventilation systems of the entire northeast wing of the John Hodgins Engineering
Building, the creation of six new laboratories to support the bioengineering
initiative, as well as the creation of twenty percent more office space for the projected
increase in the number of graduate students and postdoctoral fellows and research
staff. Other renovations are occurring in collaboration with the Department of Civil
engineering to support collaborations in the environmental engineering work of
Dr. Carlos Filipe. We look forward to the next two years with additional faculty in
the areas of process monitoring and statistics, bioengineering and environmental
engineering.

The Process Control Laboratory within the Department of Chemical Engineering has its
own VAX 3500 cluster. The polymer processing group (CAPPA-D) has several graphics
workstations for their modeling work. In addition, many researchers in the department use
personal computers for much of their computing and word processing needs as well as
data acquisition. The McMaster Nuclear Reactor, located adjacent to the Engineering
Building provides services for nuclear engineering studies, e.g. gamma ray initiated
reactions and radioactive tracers. The Institute for Materials is equipped with excellent
instruments for characterizing solids and surfaces that are available for graduate
research. Numerous pilot scale reactors are available for polymerization and computer
control studies. Some of the excellent research facilities at the McMaster University Hospital
are being utilized by the groups doing research in biomedical engineering.

An important aspect of our research effort is the extent of the interaction between faculty
members both within the department and with other departments. Many graduate students
are co-supervised by two professors, equipment is often shared and there are many joint
publications and jointly held grants. As well, the department has considerable interaction
with various industries and universities all over the world. Companies provide grants,
materials, expertise and often are involved in performing experiments that cannot be
done at McMaster.

Over the past years, two research groups have acquired large amounts of specialized
equipment and have become internationally prominent. The Process Control Group has
organized the McMaster Advanced Control Consortium (MACC) to build on the strength of the
software and expertise related to the computer control of chemical processes. The McMaster
Institute for Polymer Production Technology (MIPPT) was founded by the department in 1982
and has attracted support from government and industry. MIPPT has extensive facilities
for the study of polymerization reactions of industrial interest.

The McMaster Centre for Pulp and Paper Technology has recently started due to substantial
support from the federal network of excellence grant and support from industry.

The modeling of polymer processing operations is done in collaboration with industry in the
Centre for Advanced Polymer Processing and Design (CAPPA-D).