Professor John Dennis

Research Experience

Dr. Dennis was a Lecturer in the Department of Chemical Engineering from 1984 to 1989 having previously been an undergraduate and PhD student there. During this period he published on the control of sulphur emissions from fluidised bed combustors and on the problems of gas combustion in fluidised beds. He left Cambridge to become an engineering consultant in 1989 specialising in the solution of difficult process or economic problems, with areas of technical interest including heat and mass transfer in reactors, combustion, and fluidised bed reactions. He has had close involvement with collaborative research involving academia and industry. He is a member of the EPSRC's Peer Review College. He returned to the University and was a University Lecturer from October, 2002, Senior Lecturer from October, 2004 and has been Reader in Chemical Reaction Engineering since October, 2008. Recent areas of research include the fluidised bed gasification of biomass, fundamental studies of fluidised bed hydrodynamics using MRI, discrete element modelling of fluidised beds, clean coal technology using hydrogasification followed by combined reforming and shift with in situ CO2 removal, novel fluidising techniques for processing fuels with a high content of volatile matter, chemical looping combustion, scale-down of the Fischer Tropsch reaction, the production of transport fuels from algae and LCA studies of biofuels. He has published 100 papers on combustion, combustion-related topics and the physics of fluidisation.