Welcome to Kaisare Research Group at IIT Madras
Energy: Catalysis, Combustion and Control
Welcome to the Kaisare Research Group at the Indian Institute of Technology – Madras. We work broadly in the area of “Energy: Catalysis, Combustion and Control” (EC3). The EC3 lab is located on the fourth floor in the NAC Building in the IIT Madras Campus.
We started as a research group working primarily in modeling, design and control. Research scholars from our group have worked in areas as diverse as microreactor modeling and design for combustion and hydrogen generation; reinforcement learning; model predictive control of distributed systems; adsorptive hydrogen storage and CO2 separation; and catalytic reactors for CO2 reduction and power generation. Indeed, these represent PhD thesis topics of graduates of our group in the decade ending 2020. Since the last few years, we have transformed ourselves from a primarily simulations group to one that is focused on experiments.
Our major research thrust is in multi-scale approaches, both numerically and experimentally, for catalytic reacting systems for Energy Applications. Our expertise lies in both Reaction Engineering and Process Control. Please check the research page to get an overview of research in our group. Our current research projects include:
Design and analysis of catalytic micro-reactors; Catalytic CO2 reduction and alkane activation; Automation and control in chemical processes; Adsorptive CO2 capture; and Stability and combustion of water-in-diesel emulsions.
About the PI
Prof. Kaisare received his PhD in Chemical Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology. His thesis was focused on Model Predictive Control and Reinforcement Learning for control of bioreactors and in hydrogen generation in microreactors. Thereafter, he did a post-doc at University of Delaware working on modeling of microreactors for portable power generation. He then spent four years as Assistant Professor in IIT-Madras. He then switched to industrial R&D for three years, working at General Motors and ABB Corporate Research. Thereafter, he joined back at IIT-Madras, where he is currently a Professor in Chemical Engineering. His lab is focused on multi-scale approach combining experiments and simulations for design, analysis and control of catalytic microreactors for combustion, CO2 conversion and separation, and energy applications.