JCEJ Paper Award is given for outstanding contribution to chemical engineering documented in a paper published in Journal of Chemical Engineering of Japan. The selection is made by means of a three-stage process consisting of nomination, first round elimination, and point rating. Outstanding Paper Awards Subcommittee of the journal has assessed the 116 papers published in 2013, corresponding to volume 46. The subcommittee selected the candidates of the award and the members of the editorial board confirmed the selection. As a result of this process, the editorial board finally selected the following five papers for the award of 2013.
"Radiation Properties of Coal Char ParticleCloud" by Yoshinori Itaya, Fumiya Kosaka and Nobusuke Kobayashi, Gifu University and Nagoya University (Itaya et al., 2013) Citation: This paper presents the evaluation on the radiation properties of coal char and ash particles. Char in coal-firing and gasification processes exists in a form of heterogeneous composite particles consisting of nano-order fine particles made mainly of soot and micron-order particles of carbon and ash components. The authors successfully determined dependency of carbon content on the properties in the term of monochromatic extinction efficiency, whose magnitude was reasonable compared with those predicted from Mie's theory, through the FT-IR measurement of char classified into a narrow particle size distribution by a wet pretreatment. They noted also a strong forward scattering. The results contribute to the simplified but precise analyses ignoring the effect of scattering for radiation heat transfer problems in the processes. Thus the paper deserves to the Outstanding Paper Awards.2. "Evaluation of a Self-Heat Recuperative ermal Process Based on ermodynamic Irreversibility and Exergy" by Yasuki Kansha, Yui Kotani, Muhammad Aziz, Akira Kishimoto and Atsushi Tsutsumi, the University of Tokyo and Tokyo Institute of Technology (Kansha et al., 2013) Citation: This paper describes a simple calculation technique for the minimum energy required for thermal processes. The authors present an exergy analysis and a calculation method for a self-heat recuperative thermal process. The authors pay attentions to the minimum energy required for the thermal process and indicated that this process can achieve energy requirements close to the energy required for heat transfer from an exergy point of view by both the theoretical and graphical analyses. In the theoretical analysis, the simple equation of the numerical minimum energy required for heat transfer was derived. These achievements contribute to as new calculation method that examines the energy saving potential when designing a thermal process. Therefore, this paper deserves the Outstanding Paper Award.3. "Micropore Filling Phase Permeation of a Condensable Vapor in Silica Membranes: A Molecular Dynamics Study" by Tomohisa Yoshioka, Hiroki Nagasawa, Masakoto Kanezashi and Toshinori Tsuru, Hiroshima University (Yoshioka et al., 2013) Citation: In this paper, the permeation...