Topic

Industry-Academia Interaction: A personal Perspective on collaborative R&D

Speaker

Arun S. Mujumdar
Mechanical Engineering Department
National University of Singapore, Singapore
http://serve.me.nus.edu.sg/arun
mpeasm@nus.edu.sg

Date

Friday - 15 March 2013

Time

12:00 – 13:00

Venue

E3-06-10

Synopsis

This informal presentation will provide an overview of my experience with collaborative R&D carried out with diverse industry partners at McGill University in Canada and more recently here at NUS. Engineering research in academia is largely of the “closed loop” variety in that it appears to address needs of other academics rather than industry. I define it as research by academics and for academics.  Such research is also encouraged by the need to publish in high impact factor journals and attract citations. True impact of engineering research should be assessed on the basis of its outcomes useful to the society at large and not easily measurable output metrics such as citations, h factor etc. Lack of easy-to-measure metrics is a major deterrent to using impactful outcomes to evaluate research output. Starting with a quick presentation of the backdrop against which I will present my personal experiences a large variety of R&D projects with companies ranging from Fortune 100 to start-ups in North America. Some collaborative projects with industry were great successes academically but not commercially; they resulted in several doctoral theses, postdoctoral research as well as publications but the concept was “too innovative” and capital-intensive for a conservative industry. Some resulted in massive productivity gains and some in termination of in-house R&D projects. Some projects resulted in providing design guidelines on the basis of new knowledge created or new ideas developed. There was no correlation between the size of the funding, location of the company and the success rate. However, short term projects and those subject to “shifting goalposts syndrome” typically did not provide useful outcomes. Without divulging any proprietary information, this talk will end with a list of lessons learnt about when industry-academic collaboration has chance of success and when it is unlikely to succeed. Recommendations will be made for those entering academia (as well as those already seasoned in academia) as to how one may proactively enhance one’s chance of success when seeking industry collaboration.

Biography

A chemical engineering graduate of University of Mumbai (now Institute of Chemical Technology), Arun earned his M. Eng. and PhD degrees from McGill University, Montreal, Canada, before proceeding to an industrial R&D position as an Aerodynamicist in a research centre in the USA. He returned to Montreal two years later to join the Pulp & Paper research Institute of Canada where his “drying” career started with basic and applied research on paper drying and later in a decade-long effort to develop a superheated steam dryer for newsprint and tissue paper. Concurrently he worked on several research topics in transport phenomena and computational fluid dynamics. His research portfolio included medium as well as long term research projects with an engineering application in mind. He also carried out significant R&D effort in conjunction with industry in Canada and the USA not counting numerous short term consulting projects. He has had continuous connection with diverse industrial sectors (pulp and paper, foods, agricultures, pharmaceuticals, wood processing etc) for over three decades; this has shaped his teaching philosophy as well as engineering research strategies. Although never focused on publications and resulting metrics as a measure of impact of his research, these numbers are nevertheless rather significant as a by-product of his research effort. He is world’s top contributor to the archival drying literature. He has published over 480 journal papers (about 60% with focus on drying) which have attracted close to 6000 citations with h factor of 35. He has edited over 60 books, authored 3 books (all translated into several languages). His Handbook of Industrial Drying (CRC Press, now undergoing 4th edition) is considered the Bible of Industrial Drying around the world. He is Editor-in-Chief of Drying Technology - a Q1 journal ranked 10th amongst Mechanical engineering journals. Winner of numerous international awards for excellence in research, he was conferred Doctor Honoris Causa by Lodz Technical University, Poland (2008) and University of Lyon1 (2012). Dr Mujumdar has strong interests in innovation, creativity, globalization as well as industry-academia interaction in engineering R&D and has lectured extensively in over 40 countries. He is founding Program Chair of the widely acclaimed biennial International drying Symposium (IDS) series which started in 1978 in Montreal and is continuing with participants from up to 50 countries, having spawned four other continent-wide conferences focused on drying science, engineering and technology.

A L L   A R E   W E L C O M E.   A D M I S S I O N  I S F R E E.

08:30-08:45

Registration

08:45-09:45

Introduction, fundamentals, design strategy, classification & selection of dryers

Prof A.S. Mujumdar

Minerals, Metals, and Materials Technology Centre (M3TC), NUS

09:45-10:15

Energy saving strategies for
industrial dryers

Dr. Chung Lim Law

University of Nottingham, Malaysia Campus

10:15-10:30

Tea/Coffee Break

10:30-11:30

Industrial drying practice: Coal, biotech and pharmaceuticals

Prof A.S. Mujumdar / Dr. Sachin Jangam

Minerals, Metals, and Materials Technology Centre (M3TC), NUS

11:30-12:30

Recent developments and R&D opportunities in drying

Prof. A.S. Mujumdar / Dr. Sakamon Devahastin

M3TC, NUS / King Mongkut’s University of Technology Thonburi, Thailand

12:30-13:00

Open Discussion