Mujumdar - Current Status of Global R&D in Dryingthe implementation phase since only generating new knowledge is not enough; it must
be applied in practice for societal benefit.
What is remarkable about this development is that it has occurred over the whole
world; indeed the slack in drying R&D experienced over the past decade in the western
countries and Japan has been more than compensated for by increase in such activity in
the developing economies of the world, with one notable exception of India. Still, over
250 patents are granted annually by the US Patent Office and about 100 by the European
Community Patent Office. These numbers are a testimonial to industrial interest in dry-
ing technology development. The corresponding numbers for other unit operations
which are more in vogue in academia, e.g., adsorption, crystallization, membrane sepa-
rations, are each about an order-of-magnitude lower. The negative correlation between
the academic activity and industrial patent activity is probably a result of lack of proac-
tive interaction between industry and academia, which the author has termed in earlier
publications as a “closed loop” model of academic research leading to “research by aca-
demics and for academics.” For an applied discipline like drying technology lack of in-
dustry-academic interaction can have serious negative effects. Faculty members must be
attuned to industrial needs to carry out relevant research and solve real- not imaginary-
problems. Pie-in-the-sky curiosity-driven research projects are the realm of pure
sciences which are funded independently; engineering and technological R&D must have
practical relevance to justify continued support by tax-payers and industry. Impact of
such research should be measured not by impact factors of journals papers are pub-
lished in or the citation counts- not even the so-called over-hyped “h” factor-but by its
real life applications. We need measures to assess engineering research and credit it
properly.
9.2. A HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE
It was early in the seventies that I carried out my first detailed literature search of
on all aspects of drying. This was in itself a massive task as it involved long days and
nights at the library and extensive snail mail correspondence even beyond the “iron cur-
tain”. I was perplexed by the lack of scientific literature in the English language at that
time. Much of the scientific and engineering literature on drying appeared in Russian,
Japanese, German, Polish, Hungarian and French. Despite the fact that drying is a key
operation in almost all industrial sectors, consuming the most energy and often deter-
mining the quality of the product, it is astonishing that the academic research communi-
ty worldwide, with some notable exceptions, had ignored drying as a research and de-
velopment area worth pursuing. I also noticed that several industrial sectors shared
common drying problems and indeed technologies but were happily unaware of the de-
velopments in other sectors. The need to bring together R&D personnel, technologists,
vendors of drying equipment as well as academics under one umbrella was obvious. Vi-
sion is defined as the ability to see the invisible. To me the need for consolidated R&D in
drying seemed too obvious to be considered as a “visionary development”. I believe
dryers were simply built rather than designed when the oil price was in lower single
digits and no one worried about the finite extent of fossil fuel reserves the earth has. No
one imagined the future needs of the most populated parts of the world which will strain