Harry Van den Akker

Professor Harry Van den Akker has been the Bernal Professor of Fluid Mechanics at the University of Limerick since 2013. In addition, he still is affiliated with Delft University of Technology as Professor of Transport Phenomena. Prior to joining ‘Delft’, he was a research engineer at Shell Research in Amsterdam. He has held visiting appointments in Princeton and at King’s College London. He was President of the Dutch Physical Society for 6 years, and Scientific Director of the Netherlands Research School in Process Technology for 12 years.

He has supervised the work of some 35 PhD students at Delft, mentored 4 assistant professors there who all made it to full professor, wrote a textbook on Transport Phenomena (in Dutch, in English, and potentially in Japanese) and published over 150 peer reviewed journal papers with an h-index of 39/40. He is regarded as a world leader in the (computational) fluid dynamics of multiphase mixing. Current research interests: Simulation of pharmaceutical processes and applying Lattice Boltzmann techniques for simulating meso-scale processes.

Additional Links


Bakker A. and H.E.A. Van den Akker (1992) ‘ A computational study on dispersing gas in a stirred reactor ‘ In: R. King (eds). Fluid Mechanics of Mixing: Modelling, Operations and Experimental Techniques. Dordrecht: kluwer Academic Publ.


Kamali M.R. and H.E.A. Van den Akker (2013) ‘ Simulating Gas-Liquid Flows by Means of a Pseudo-potential Lattice Boltzmann Method ‘. Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research , 52 :11365-11377.


Mousazadeh, F., Van den Akker, H. E. A. and Mudde, R. F. (2013) ‘ Direct numerical simulation of an exothermic gas-phase reaction in a packed bed with random particle distribution ‘. Chemical Engineering Science , 100 :259-265.