Adel Mhamdi

Adel Mhamdi is a Professor at RWTH Aachen University's Department of Chemical Engineering within the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering. His research focuses on process systems engineering with emphasis on nonlinear model predictive control, hybrid modeling, and sustainable process design for chemical and biochemical systems. He leads research in electrified biodiesel production, distillation optimization, and polymerization process control.

His research interests span chemical process control, biodiesel production optimization, distillation modeling, hybrid mechanistic-data-driven approaches, polymerization processes, and heat transfer optimization. Mhamdi develops advanced control strategies including economic NMPC, distributed control architectures, and chance-constrained optimization to address challenges in flexible operation of energy-intensive processes. His work integrates computational fluid dynamics with process modeling for reactor design and optimization.

Analysis of his recent publications reveals strong trends in electrification of chemical processes, particularly biodiesel production with heat integration. His research increasingly incorporates machine learning for hybrid modeling and employs advanced computational techniques like Bayesian optimization for reactor geometry design. Key application areas include renewable energy systems, polymer manufacturing, and separation processes.

Mhamdi actively supervises doctoral researchers including M. El Wajeh, J.M. Faust, and P.J. Joy who appear as first authors on multiple publications. His research group collaborates extensively with the Mitsos group at RWTH Aachen, securing publications in top journals including Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research and Computers & Chemical Engineering. Current projects focus on real-time optimization of electrified processes and development of open-source modeling platforms like HybridML.