Rodrigo F. M. Souza, Dr.Eng.
Professor of Chemical and Materials Engineering
Pyrometallurgy and Waste Treatment Researcher
I’m serving as a professor (adjunct, tenured) at the Department of Chemical & Materials Engineering (Deqm) of the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio). I received my doctoral degree in Materials Engineering, Chemical & Metallurgical Processes, also from PUC-Rio. The focus of my research is Extractive Metallurgy and Environmental Sciences, mostly on what touches Pyrometallurgy and Waste Treatment topics.
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Main interests are associated with: critical raw materials for energy transition, non-ferrous metals processing from non-metallurgical resources (e.g., low-grade ores, industrial and urban residues), applied thermodynamics, transport phenomena as well as environmental modeling of the chemical fate of metals, here as contaminants, as well as typical mining and petrochemical reagents.
Since 2018, I supervise M.Sc. and Dr.Eng. reseach as well as coordinate projects at Deqm/PUC-Rio.
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Learn how you can join my research group or collaborate with us...
Research in our group
Our group acts in two streams of research of the Deqm's graduate programa: (i) Mineral-metallurgical processes (Chemical Engineering); (ii) Waste treatment (Environmental Processes).
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The key objective of our research is to design selective routes for metals recovery and to predict the chemical fate of metals under specific conditions, in industrial and environmental conditions. For that, we
develop a mechanistic and quantitative understanding of metals' behavior, using a combination of experimental studies (e.g., furnaces tests at distinct atmospheres, thermogravimetric analysis, materials characterization and analytical chemistry) combined with a modeling/simultaion approach (e.g., HSC Chemistry, COMSOL Multiphysics, MATLAB and Python).
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Recent publications
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