Staff

Plesu Popescu, Alexandra Elena

Associate Professor

Research Area:
Catalysis, energy and environment

Dr. Alexandra Elena Plesu Popescu
Associate Professor
University of Barcelona
Faculty of Chemistry
Department of Chemical Engineering and Analytic Chemistry
C/ Martí i Franquès, 1 floor 6

Dr. Alexandra Plesu is currently Associate Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering and Analytical Chemistry of the University of Barcelona. Born in Bucharest (Romania) in 1980, she studied Chemical Engineering at the Polytechnic University of Bucharest (2004) and developed her Master thesis in the Use of Computers in Chemical and Biochemical Engineering (2005). The PhD thesis was carried out jointly between the Polytechnic University of Bucharest (UPB) and the University of Barcelona (directors: Prof Grigore Bozga – UPB, Prof José Costa López and Prof Joan Llorens – UB), obtaining a PhD degree from both universities in 2012.  

She is Guest Editor for a Special Issue (Journal of Cleaner Production) of PRES’21 dedicated to “Sustainable Cleaner Production through Process Integration, Modelling and Optimisation”. She is active member in the International Scientific Committees such as for: PRES (Conference Process Integration, Modelling and Optimization for Energy Saving and Pollution Reduction) since 2013, ESCAPE26 (European Symposium on Computer Aided Process Engineering) in 2015 and 2016, SDEWES21 (Conference on Sustainable Development of Energy, Water and Environment Systems) since 2020. Member of the Editorial Board of Energy Sources Part A: Recovery, Utilization and Environmental Effects, Clean Technologies and Environmental Policy and Chemical Engineering Transactions journals. In addition, she performed more than 150 reviews of articles from major journals such as Journal of Cleaner Production, Applied Thermal Engineering, Energy, Clean Technologies and Environmental Policy, etc.  

She has more than 71 international peer-reviewed publications, presented at many international and national conferences, most of them belonging to computer-aided chemical engineering research field. Supervised more than 41 MSc and currently supervises 2 PhD thesis. Participated in 12 research projects, acting as project manager in one of them, and participated in several technology transfer studies to the industry and forensic chemistry issues. In 2009 she joined the research group of Separation Processes, Membranes and Polymers under the direction of Prof. Juan Llorens Llacuna, focusing her interests on Process Integration, process simulation, process synthesis and design, biofuels, energy saving, carbon footprint, developing a methodology of Circular Economy concept based on Exergy Footprint. Since 2016 she got interested in the use of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulation to Chemical Engineering applications. Currently she joined the Institute of Theoretical and Computational Chemistry of the Universitat de Barcelona (IQTCUB), focusing on CFD as a reliable tool for scaling up from basic research to commercial applications and study the main unit operations for chemical industry to meet society needs.