ROD FOX COMPUTES TWO VIEWS OF FLUIDS, BOTH DYNAMIC

It’s the year 2000 and Rodney Fox—wine lover and professor of chemical engineering—is deep into a problem in his chosen field of computational fluid dynamics (CFD).

Specifically, Fox is computing the dynamics of investing in the 2000 Bordeaux—a fluid touted by the pros as possibly the finest vintage in a generation. Computation complete, Fox buys twelve cases on spec—within two years it will sell for several times what he paid for it.

But Fox won’t be drinking the 2000 Bordeaux anytime soon. And he’ll be cellaring, not selling his prize—“a minimum of 5 to 10 years,” he insists. It’s that kind of long-term thinking that has brought him international recognition as one of the world’s leading experts in CFD.

Fox will pursue both passions next year while on sabbatical. First, he’ll spend six months at Switzerland’s Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (that’s the Swiss Federal Technical University in Zürich for the German-challenged). He’ll round out his European tour in Paris, where he’ll be working on spray combustion issues at the École Centrale, France’s leading mechanical engineering institute.

Oh, and Bordeaux is just a short day’s drive to the south.

Fox has covered some distance since his schoolboy days in Wichita, where before high school he had never left the country. When it came time for college, he did make it to Manhattan—Manhattan, Kansas, that is, where he earned his bachelor’s, master’s, and Ph.D. in chemical engineering at Kansas State. And he stayed at K-State for the first part of his career, joining the electrical and computer engineering faculty.

But Fox was hardly chained to his lab or, for that matter, to Kansas itself. As an undergraduate, he spent a term abroad at a German university. Then, as a grad student, he went to Zürich ETH on a Fulbright, where he established the professional relationships that have made him a regular visitor there.

While Europe may seem like Oz to some Kansans, to Fox it seemed like home. So he took a pass on the ruby slippers and, after finishing graduate school, spent several years doing research in France. As an undergrad, Fox had traveled to France’s Bordeaux region to polish his French language skills, and that is where he developed his keen interest in French wines.

Wine, however, wasn’t the only thing French that Fox came to appreciate—his wife, Roberte, is a Parisian. Ironically, though, the two met not in France but at Kansas State. Trained as a teacher, today she divides her time between various civic pursuits and her duties as president of an investment club (not, Fox insists, to support his taste for Bordeaux).

They’ll have plenty of time next year to indulge Paris’s many temptations—not to mention those famous vineyards to the south. Before Paris, though, he’ll be in Zürich with long-time colleague Massimo Morbidelli, a specialist in chemical reaction engineering whose work flows nicely into a major undertaking of Fox’s to learn how surface chemistry affects aggregation rates and production processes.

“If we can understand what happens at the surface,” Fox observes, “then we can control it. Right now this is done empirically—and that’s kind of hit and miss.”

Besides Morbidelli’s group at ETH, the effort includes about half a dozen colleagues from chemical engineering and other departments at Iowa State, as well as collaborators from Kansas State and the University of Minnesota. The long-term goal of the project is to keep nanoparticles in fluid processes from aggregating into larger units, which alters their fundamental characteristics.

“We’re going to take the quantum mechanics codes from Mark Gordon’s group in the chemistry department,” Fox says. “My colleague Monica Lamm is looking at molecular dynamic simulations of aggregating particles, and Dennis Vigil (chemical engineering) and Shanker Subramaniam (mechanical engineering) will look at larger clusters and how they change due to flow. Then my group will look at the reaction in larger scale—it’s a multi-scale problem that makes it interesting and difficult.”

The project will take four years to complete. But for someone with the patience of a lover of fine Bordeaux, four years are merely drops in the bottom of a wine glass. And by then Fox and his colleagues can toast their success, perhaps with a bottle of the 2000 Cos d'Estournel St-Estèphe, “gorgeous on the nose, with currants, blackberries, and cut flowers, full-bodied with ultra-fine tannins….”

With any luck, like Fox’s career itself, the vintage will have developed impressively over the years, assuming nuance and a depth of character only hinted at when still hanging on the vine.

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