Liang-Shih Fan, distinguished university professor and C. John Easton professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at Ohio State, is one of the world’s leading authorities on particulates and multiphase reaction engineering (PMRE). PMRE is concerned with the flow behavior of particle material with gas, or gas-liquid mixtures and their accompanying chemical reactions.
He is an inventor of a number of industrially-viable clean energy conversion processes and environmental emissions control technologies. These emission control technologies include the Ohio State Coal Ash Reactivation (OSCAR) process for SO2 and heavy metal capture, first successfully tested in McCracken Power Plant at The Ohio State University. The Carbonation-Calcination Reaction (CCR) process was developed to capture CO2 produced from power and chemical production plants and has been commercially licensed by Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) in Taiwan for CO2 capture from cement manufacturing. The success of the CCR technology led to ITRI receiving the R&D 100 award together with Professor Fan.
In 2007, Professor Fan successfully formed a company, Tech4Imaging, to commercialize a novel non-invasive volume imaging technology, known as Electrical Capacitance Volume Tomography (ECVT). The company has since successfully sold numerous systems internationally, and is also being used in the NASA Research program.
Professor Fan developed redox chemical looping technologies for electricity, syngas, hydrogen, and chemical (e.g. methanol, acetic acid, and liquid fuels) production under CO2-emission neutral or negative conditions. He successfully formed another company, LSF Looping Inc., to commercialize the chemical looping technology platform with clean hydrogen and power generation being the first industrial applications of interest.