
Hamilton, ON
Dr. Kamil Khan has been named as one of two recipients of the 2020 CAST W. David Smith Graduate Publication Award. Presented by the Computing and Systems Technology (CAST) Division of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE), this award annually recognizes a publication by a student in "the application of computing and systems technology to chemical engineering" within the five years before nomination. The award will be presented at the AIChE Annual Meeting in November.
Dr. Khan's nomination was based on his 2015 publication A vector forward mode of automatic differentiation for generalized derivative evaluation with Paul I. Barton in Optimization Methods and Software. Combined with the authors' prior work, this article represented the first accurate, general, tractable method for evaluating useful local sensitivity information for nonsmooth process models, for use in simulation and optimization. This advance has since enabled nonsmooth numerical methods to robustly simulate and analyze process systems with discrete-continuous behaviour, including flash units and the design of multistream heat exchangers (MHEX) and work/heat exchange networks (WHEN).