Processing the bigger picture

Nilay Shah always knew that he wanted to be an engineer. At school he liked chemistry but was more interested in its application than fundamental science. Chemical engineering seemed like a natural career option. When growing up in Kenya, “there was never any doubt that I was going to be an engineer,” he says. His mother called him “the professor,” he laughs. He planned to study chemical engineering in the UK then work in Nigeria, but he decided to stay on at Imperial College London after graduating.

He has now spent almost 40 years at Imperial, working in areas from paint-making to vaccine production, and has seen chemical engineering change in ways that his younger self’s ambitions could not have foreseen. One of the biggest changes in Shah’s time as an engineer has been the growing use of information technology.

Driven by falling hardware costs and growing software power, IT has shaped his career and, thanks in part to his own work, changed the nature of research in chemical engineering. These changes went alongside upheavals in the processing industries that fed off that research. Attention turned from oil refineries and petrochemical plants to bioprocessing, pharmaceuticals and other processing challenges. On the energy front, for example, with the goal of achieving net zero and sustainability more broadly, the focus has moved from processing hydrocarbons to becoming ‘carbon free’ and the prospect of a hydrogen economy and synthetic fuels.

A PhD in processing

Shah’s choice of PhD subject led him to study how processing plants plan and schedule their operations. This involved working on the fine chemicals and paint-making operations of ICI, then the UK’s dominant processing business. The company was interested in how to run production lines that can deliver a stream of different products. Paints, for example, come in many colours and variants. “Working out the sequence that makes the most sense is quite a complicated problem,” says Shah. His research started with a PhD thesis on ‘Efficient scheduling technologies for multipurpose plants’.

That PhD was in the Centre for Process Systems Engineering (CPSE), which opened in the late 1980s. This was an Interdisciplinary Research Centre (IRC), an initiative launched in the 1980s by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council to work on topics that crossed disciplinary boundaries and with close involvement from industry. Shah proudly points out that the CPSE is one of just two of the original IRCs that is still in business, now as a joint venture with UCL. With a roster of about 40 academics and 200 researchers, Shah believes that CPSE, where he was director, is the UK’s biggest process systems engineering research group.

Improved efficiency with software

At the time, the process industry was beginning to explore the role that computing could play in the design, manufacturing and operation of process plants. The IRC’s research made great strides in developing software that helped in this. These were early days in bringing IT to complex processing plants. “We were making a lot of progress on algorithms,” says Shah. “At the same time there were dramatic improvements in the hardware.”

The research revolved around modelling, simulation and optimisation of chemical and energy processes from the molecular level up to simulating complete chemical plants. That work culminated in the development of a range of tools, including gPROMS, a software platform for building computer models for monitoring and forecasting a processing plant’s performance throughout the process lifecycle. The technology has had an impact throughout the processing industry, including oil, pharmaceuticals, consumer products, and food. Its models are used for everything from real-time process plant design and optimisation to operator training.

From research to business

The spread of industries that the CPSE has covered over the decades reflects the changing shape of process systems engineering in the UK. Shah’s research had its roots in ICI’s Dulux paints factories – bought by AkzoNobel in 2008 – but the CPSE’s tools have much wider relevance. “Now we’re much more interested in sectors like pharmaceuticals, agrochemicals, and then the systems engineering aspects of energy.”

With this background and his interest in businesses, has Shah ever been tempted to leave academia and move into industry? “I’ve been asked a few times, but I still really enjoy teaching and research. I don’t really want to lose that.” Shah sees working with businesses as part of the job of an academic engineer. “I’ve always been interested in doing things with companies. Either collaborating with companies or setting up companies with colleagues to try to test these things.” Shah’s current business ventures include Zero Petroleum, a synthetic petroleum startup that he cofounded with Paddy Lowe FREng (‘Fuel for a net zero future’, Ingenia 89). “We can make a drop-in jet fuel and a drop-in gasoline,” Shah explains.

Shah sees developing zero carbon aviation fuel as a “classical chemical engineering problem”. As he explains, “chemical engineers have been fine tuning fossil-based aviation fuel for decades. Now we realise we need new ones that are fossil free. The problem is jets are still running on those, and jets are not going to change their engines anytime soon.”

Always keen on seeing his research out in the real world, as part of developing the curriculum for students at Imperial, Shah took the opportunity of a spell as Director of Undergraduate Studies to develop a ‘business for engineers’ programme. This required students to write a business plan for their work. Alongside introducing an opportunity to ‘think business’ into the engineering teaching, Shah has campaigned for a wider acceptance of diversity and inclusion in academia. “I’ve always felt that engineers are important in society, and they should also reflect the society that they belong to. Secondly, it is unfair that certain people are not getting access to what I think is a very exciting and rewarding profession.”

There is another reason why diversity matters. “You get better engineering if you have different perspectives. Most big engineering decisions actually have a lot of societal implications.” Diversity brings in that awareness of society. Shah has carried his conviction that diversity is essential for engineers and engineering into his work with the Royal Academy of Engineering, where he has been an active member of the Diversity and Inclusion Committee, advising on a variety of activities that have had a meaningful impact on diversity across the engineering profession. And as Chair of the Academy’s Membership Committee, played a key role in the establishment of Fellowship Fit for the Future initiative, which is driving more nominations of engineers from underrepresented groups, and oversaw its implementation.

The same concern about societal implications is important in another increasingly important aspect of Shah’s work, AI. AI was an esoteric academic pursuit when Shah started his engineering career. He looked into the idea of machine learning in the 1990s but was held back by the lack of computer power and the datasets there to feed the learning. “It didn’t really go anywhere.”

“We’re still getting to grips with exactly what AI will help us with in engineering,” Shah says. He has been looking into areas where special purpose AI methods can be useful, for example, in his work on using renewable energy to make hydrogen, and to analyse and simplify complex series of weather data. “That’s very different from what people think about when they talk about AI.”

Systems for a sustainable future

Talk of hydrogen and renewable energy leads into thinking about the future of energy and how to get to net zero. As Shah sees it, we are halfway there. “We’ve done the easy bit of the energy transition in many ways. This first bit, which has got us a long way, switching off coal-fired power plants, having a lot of wind power, trying to maintain our nuclear fleet. The next 50% is the hard 50%. We have got to electrify transport and decarbonise power completely.” He was involved in the Academy’s advice to government on the Clean Power 2030 Action Plan, as part of its working groups focusing on decarbonisation of the UK’s energy system and the role of hydrogen in a net zero energy system.

That policy input fits in with Shah’s belief in ‘systems thinking’. “A lot of my research has had a systems element in it. It’s something that I’ve enjoyed but sometimes found difficult to explain to people. Often people want a simple answer, and the answer is often not simple. Most of the things that we need to tackle now are not simple linear problems. They’re complex, lots of moving parts, nonlinear, dynamic. So that systems thinking is very important.” This is as important in policy issues as it is for engineering systems and processes.

Shah takes that thinking into the next phase of his career. After running the Department of Chemical Engineering at Imperial since 2016, he is about to become one of four directors – one each from engineering, science, business, and health – of a new School of Convergence Science in Sustainability at Imperial, one of four new Schools of Convergence Science. The plan is to look at ways of addressing the big problems that face society, such as climate change, decarbonisation and sustainability. In a different area, he adds, “Sustainable healthcare is something we want to do jointly with the health school.”

The new school will be a way to focus thinking and bring research disciplines together, capitalising on research from elsewhere. No classrooms and no degrees awarded, more “schools of future thought” as Imperial bills them.

The School of Sustainability inevitably takes Shah further into policy thinking. “I’ve become increasingly interested in being involved with advisory activities with government, getting involved with engineering, evidence and advice.” With a focus on climate and sustainability policy, Shah’s work with the Academy has also taken in biofuels and technologies for greenhouse gas removal. All of this policy thinking lays the foundations for the new phase of Shah’s work at Imperial.

Shah is now planning workshops on such topics as energy, ecosystems, clean air, and water. “I’d be surprised if we come up with something that nobody had ever thought of,” he adds. “I think we know what a lot of the big societal challenges are. We’re working initially with our internal community to create a shortlist of priority themes, and then we’ll road-test those with external partners, like NGOs, foundations, government, industry, and other universities.” Then the idea is to establish a set of ‘missions’ and to become what Imperial dubs “a catalytic force” that can “bring to life an exciting new paradigm for scientific exploration”.

This puts Shah at the heart of a ‘research system’ that already has hundreds of researchers working on aspects of climate, energy and sustainability. The new school will bring in even wider expertise. In his new role Shah will be able to combine his engineering thinking with his policy work to make the most of Imperial’s diversity in research in pursuit of systems thinking on a grand scale.

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