University of Innsbruck: New Institute for Chemical Engineering
INNSBRUCK. Chemical engineers are sought-after specialists in the chemical industry, materials science and pharmaceutical companies. With the establishment of the Institute for Chemical Engineering and the Master’s course of the same name, the University of Innsbruck will set a new research and training focus.
International expertise
The state of Tyrol supports this initiative with an endowed professorship, which was filled by process engineer Kai Langenbach.
“With Kai Langenbach we have gained an internationally recognized expert for our new research area”
said Rector Tilmann Märk at the inaugural lecture of Kai Langenbach on Monday evening in the Center for Chemistry and Biomedicine (CCB) in Innsbruck.
“Thanks to the financial support of the State of Tyrol and the commitment of ADLER Lackfabrik, endowed professorships are also establishing a new teaching and research area from which the region will benefit greatly in the future.”
The dean of the Faculty of Chemistry and Pharmacy, Hubert Huppertz, particularly emphasized the thematic expansion of the faculty’s teaching and research offerings in the direction of a
Chemical engineering education and research emerged, which was requested by many Tyrolean companies and has now become a reality. “
With the introduction of the chemical engineering specialization, students are trained in a highly interdisciplinary field that deals with the sustainable conversion of substances and the development and application of new processes with regard to industrial applications. The research as well as the business location Tyrol benefits from this
, explains Rainer Seyrling, Head of the Business Location, Digitization and Science Department at the State of Tyrol.
Theoretical methods for practice
Kai Langenbach is a process engineer with a focus on complex material systems.
“For example, rapid substances or the build-up of phases can be complex, as in foams or emulsions”
explains the newly appointed professor. “The starting point of my work is always the material data of the systems, which also depend, for example, on the mutual orientation of the molecules to one another and on the interface properties of the mixtures.” In terms of method, he relies on theoretically sound approaches such as classical density functional theory. Langenbach further develops the theoretical material data description in order to describe orientation effects in material data theories. This methodological work is currently being expanded by his research group in order to be able to deal with non-equilibrium systems such as foams.
To person
Kai Langenbach was born in 1984 in Siegen. He studied physical engineering at the Technical University of Berlin, where he did his doctorate in the field of thermodynamics and thermal process engineering. His doctorate was followed by a postdoctoral period at the Chair of Thermodynamics at the Technical University of Kaiserslautern. After a further period as a research fellow from the German Research Foundation at Rice University in Houston (USA)
