Dr. Charles A. Petty is a member of the Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science at Michigan State University and is presently the Director of the NSF Center for Multiphase Transport Phenomena. In 1966, Professor Petty received a BS degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of Florida. He completed his PhD studies in 1970 at Florida and joined the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Delaware as an Assistant Professor. While at Delaware, he participated in a fluidized bed coal combustion program at the Argonne National Laboratory as an NSF Summer Faculty Intern. Professor Petty joined the faculty at Michigan State University in 1977 after spending a year at the University of California at Santa Barbara.
Dr. Petty is a member of AIChE, APS/DFD, and ASEE. He presently serves as an Academic Trustee of the CACHE Corporation, a non-profit organization for the advancement of computer aids in chemical engineering. His research and teaching interests include transport phenomena, applied mathematics, complex fluids, and hydrocyclone separators. He and his students have published the salient results of their research in more than sixty papers and have made presentations at more than 150 national and international conferences.
In the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, Dr. Petty organized an NSF industry/university cooperative research program in collaboration with the Dorr-Oliver Company. In 1984/85, he spent a sabbatical year at Dorr-Oliver and Southampton University (UK) studying hydrocyclone separators. In 1989, with support from industry and the federal government, Professor Petty founded the Hydrocyclone Development Consortium at MSU to further advance the use of hydrocyclones for oil/water separation on offshore platforms. In 1999, Professor Petty organized an NSF Combined Research and Curriculum Development project in the area of computational multiphase transport phenomena for graduate and undergraduate students in collaboration with the University of Akron, the University of Tulsa, and twelve companies. This activity evolved into the current NSF Industry/University Cooperative Research Center for Multiphase Transport Phenomena. This multi-university/industry research center aims to develop and deploy next generation computational models for the rapid design and analysis of traditional and emerging technologies, including cross flow filtration hydrocyclone separators.