Simpósio Comemorativo API

PREFACE

Concerning the history of research on Particulate Systems in Brazil, we would have to go back to the years between 1960s and 1970s, when the country had a small number of universities. Most of them were located either in the Southeast region of Brazil or in a few capitals in other regions, such as Curitiba, Florianópolis, Porto Alegre and Salvador. Brazil is a huge country and we must remember that in those days the contact among researchers was limited due to a few universities located far away from each other. After all, the world was not globalized and there was no internet to shorten the distances.

 

Considering this, studies on solid/fluid systems were scarce. Embryonic research on grain storage focusing on drying and some research on unsaturated flows in soils were being developed incipiently. Research in fields related to Chemical Engineering was concentrated at the Graduate Engineering Program of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro - COPPE/UFRJ, and at the Polytechnique Engineering School of the University of São Paulo, POLI/USP. The most prominent researchers who worked in this field at those universities were Affonso Carlos Seabra da Silva Telles and Giulio Massarani in Rio de Janeiro, and Giovanni Brunello in São Paulo.

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This book will focus on the journey that began at COPPE from the research initiated by the duo formed by Profs. Telles and Massarani. From 1961 to 1967, Telles earned his MSc and PhD degrees at University of Houston by researching fluid flows. Massarani also did his MSc in Houston between 1961 and 1963, working in the area of absorption. From 1967 to 1971, Massarani did his PhD at the University of Toulouse in France on the topic of flow through porous media. When they returned to COPPE both began developing research on Particulate Systems and supervising students in this area.

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In 1973, taking advantage of a visit to COPPE of the foreign researchers Claude Thirriot from the University of Toulouse, and Shragga Irmay from the Israel Institute of Technology, they set up a meeting with people interested in Particulate Systems to discuss their studies and research. In this meeting, besides the two conferences given by the foreign lecturers, 11 scientific papers were presented. This was the stepping stone of The Meeting on Flow Through Porous Media, Encontro Sobre Escoamentos em Meios Porosos, ENEMP (in Portuguese).

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It would have been just an isolated event if some faculty members from the Physics Department of the São Paulo State University - UNESP/Rio Claro-SP had not volunteered to organize a second meeting, which was held the following year in Rio Claro. It has turned into an annual event since then and in 1995 the name was changed to “The Brazilian Congress of Particulate Systems”, although the acronym ENEMP is still used for the sake of tradition.

From 2004 up to now, the event has been held every two years. More than 500 researchers attended the 38th ENEMP at Maringá-PR in 2017and 340 papers have been published in the conference’s proceedings. The next conference, the 39th ENEMP, will be held in Belém-PA. The trio Massarani/Telles/ENEMP is responsible for a significant amount of research in Particulate Systems that has been developed in Brazil from 1973 to nowadays.

This is because in 1974, five PhD students who were faculty members in different universities began to develop their thesis at the Chemical Engineering Graduate Program (PEQ) at COPPE under the supervision of either Massarani or Telles in majors related to Particulate Systems. They were César Costapinto Santana, João Sampaio D'Ávila, José Teixeira Freire, Nehemias Curvelo Pereira and Satoshi Tobinaga. From the beginning of 1979, they earned their degrees and went back to their original universities. Freire and Tobinaga returned to the São Paulo State University (UNESP) in Rio Claro, Santana and Pereira returned to the State University of Maringá-PR (UEM) and D'Ávila to the Federal University of Sergipe, in the Northeast region. Later, Freire and Satoshi moved to the Chemical Engineering Department at the Federal University of São Carlos-SP, and Santana moved to the Chemical Engineering Department at the University of Campinas – SP (UNICAMP). Therefore, in the 1980s, 4 new potential research nuclei in Particulate Systems were
created.

In the subsequent years, graduate courses in Chemical Engineering were set up at UFSCar, UNICAMP and UEM. Meanwhile, new students continued to graduate at COPPE. As a result, the number of researchers has grown and so has the interest in fundamental and applied research on Particulate Systems. As a natural development, new research nuclei with a similar structure to that of PEQ/COPPE began to spread all over Brazil as these researchers were employed as lecturers at universities. Nowadays, there is at least one research group dedicated to studying Particulate Systems in the majority of the Brazilian states.

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The aim of this book is to introduce the now consolidated groups who are part of this history, as well as to present their most significant contributions to the field of Particulate Systems. There are four groups from the State of São Paulo, two from Rio de Janeiro, one from Minas Gerais, and a set of three states, namely, Rio Grande do Norte, Paraiba and Sergipe, representing four universities in the Northeast of Brazil. Therefore, the book comprises eight chapters, each one focused on a research group. Each chapter will focus on introducing the group’s history, as well as their main researchers and on giving a brief presentation on what they are researching now and summarizing their main contributions to the field, including a list of their most significant production and goals for future research.

 

As a final remark, all the participants in this book are happy to acknowledge and thank the Emeritus Professors Giulio Massarani and AffonsoTelles, for their pioneering work. Without them, we certainly would find it much harder to reach the advances we have already achieved in Particulate Systems research in Brazil.

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Prof. José Teixeira Freire