Dr. Castier is a professor at Texas A&M University at Qatar. He was Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering at UFRJ from 1988 to 2006 and at the United Arab Emirates University from 2006 to 2010. He was a Visiting Scholar of the Universidad de Vigo (Spain) and a Fulbright Senior Visiting Scholar at University of Delaware. His research focuses on the development of thermodynamic models for complex mixtures, confined fluids, and electrolyte solutions; new algorithms for computing thermodynamic equilibrium; applications of thermodynamics to chemical process safety; energy integration; and development of educational software. He published more than 80 journal papers. He is the developer of XSEOS, an educational Excel-based package that implements several excess Gibbs energy models and equations of state commonly used in chemical process design, and of Thermath, a computer algebra package for the automatic implementation of thermodynamic and equipment models.
Research
One goal is to apply thermodynamics to flow processes, specifically to the simulation of leaks from pressurized vessels and of supersonic fluid separators, with emphasis on the removal of natural gas impurities. Another goal is to develop equations of state for confined fluids and apply them to model adsorption and fluid behavior in heterogeneous catalytic systems, in collaboration with researchers in Delaware and Rio de Janeiro. Another goal is to develop new equations of state for electrolyte solutions, which are being applied to model the behavior of carbon dioxide in seawater at high pressure. This work is done in collaboration with researchers in Maringa (Brazil). The Qatar National Research Fund supports some of these projects.
List of external collaborators:
Vladimir F. Cabral (State University of Maringa, Brazil)
Lucio Cardozo-Filho (State University of Maringa, Brazil)
Stanley Sandler (University of Delaware, USA)
Frederico W. Tavares (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil)
Leonardo Travalloni (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil)
Facilities
The modeling and simulation projects take advantage of the outstanding computational resources available at Texas A&M University. The Raad supercomputer in Qatar is a 42+ TFLOP, 2,208-core Intel Xeon system, boasting 128 compute nodes, 2 large-memory fat nodes, and 6 powerful graphics nodes, all connected by an FDR infiniband fabric.