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Mohammad Latifi
B.Sc., M.Sc., Ph.D.
Student research project(s)

Research interests and affiliations

Research interests
  • Clean, green, and sustainable processes
  • Materials for green and clean technologies
  • Chemical reaction engineering
  • Design of fluidized bed reactors and multiphase reactors at high temperature and high pressure
  • Process electrification (induction and microwave heating)
  • Process development and scaleup with iterative process scaleup approach
  • Chemical recycling of plastics
  • Metals recycling
  • Biomass conversion
  • Syngas (hydrogen + carbon monoxide)
  • Net-zero greenhouse gas emissions
  • Gasification and steam/dry reforming
  • Pyrolysis
  • Combustion
  • Mineral processing
  • Extractive metallurgy (pyro- and hydrometallurgy)
  • Process heat integration by Pinch Design method
Expertise type(s) (NSERC subjects)
  • 1800 CHEMICAL ENGINEERING
  • 2000 MATERIALS SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

Publications

Recent publications
Book chapter
Kang, K., Nanda, S., Latifi, M., Rooholla, G., Fatehi, P., Dalai, A. K., Koziński, J. A., & Hu, Y. (2024). Gasification of Lignin for Hydrogen Production. In Rahimpour, M. R., Makarem, M. A., & Kiani, P. (eds.), Hydrogen Production from Renewable Resources and Wastes (pp. 133-157).

Biography

Dr. Mohammad Latifi is a research professor (Class II) at the Chemical Engineering Department of Polytechnique Montréal where he started to work as a postdoctoral fellow in 2012 at Process Engineering Advanced Research Lab (PEARL).

Currently, Dr. Latifi holds an NSERC-Discovery grant for metals recycling as well as chemical recycling of plastics from Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE or e-waste).

Dr. Latifi is also a cleantech entrepreneur. He co-founded NeoCtech Corp. for recycling rare earth elements from waste streams. These metals are critical for advanced clean- and high-technologies such as electric vehicles, renewable energies, electronics, and quantum materials.

At PEARL, Dr. Latifi led various cutting-edge and industrial projects such as extraction of rare earth elements, co-combustion of coal and ReEF TM for reduction of emissions from boilers, carbon coating of LFP cathode material by chemical vapor deposition, hydro- and high-temperature potash from potassium feldspar, TOTAL Chair for CO2 capturing and utilization, removal of heavy metals from phosphate ore, smelting of phosphate ore, CO 2 reduction in cement industry, metals recycling, and chemical recycling of plastics.

Accordingly, he worked with companies and institutions such as TOTAL (France), OCP Group (Morocco), Niobec (Canada), Advanced Potash Technologies (USA), Johnson Matthey Battery Materials (Canada), Accordant Energy (USA), and Canmet-MINING (Canada).

He developed an induction heating fluidized bed reactor (IHFBR) that has been employed in various projects at PEARL.

He received his PhD degree from the Chemical and Biochemical Engineering Department of Western University in London, Ontario in 2012. He carried out his PhD research at Institute for Chemical and Fuels from Alternative Resources (ICFAR) on the gasification of bio-oils to produce syngas (hydrogen + carbon monoxide) in fluidized bed reactors. During his PhD research, he developed the original Jiggle Bed Reactor (JBR), which was an induction heating assisted microreactor for high-temperature reactions (<1000 °C).

Before moving to Canada, he worked for oil and petrochemical companies in Iran such as NIPC, NIOC, and IOEC. Dr. Latifi holds a master's degree of Chemical Engineering from the University of Tehran, Iran. He worked on debottlenecking of heat exchanger networks by process heat integration employing the pinch design method during his master's research.

Teaching

  • GCH-6201:Catalysis and applied kinetics
  • GCH-6902: Design of gas-solid reactors (multiphase reactions and fluidized bed reactors)
  • GCH-8103: Biomass conversion
  • GCH-8104: Mineral processing

Education

Press review about Mohammad Latifi

March 13, 2023, La Presse, De petites victoires pour verdir le ciment Mohammad Latifi, chercheur au Département de génie chimique, partage son expertise sur les procédés existants afin de produire du béton plus « vert ».