Rakesh Agrawal is the Winthrop E. Stone Distinguished Professor of Chemical Engineering at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana.

[1] He is a chemical engineer known for contributions to separations, cryogenic gas separation and liquefaction, and for contributions to renewable energy including the conversion of biomass to chemicals and fuels, inorganic solar cell fabrication, and the synergistic use of solar energy.

[3] In 2002, Agrawal was elected as a member of the National Academy of Engineering for contributions to the development and worldwide implementation of high-efficiency and high-purity cryogenic and non-cryogenic gas separation processes.

He led the development of the APX process for natural gas liquefaction that more than doubled the production from a single train.

[7][8] He invented an efficient process to recover refrigeration from liquefied natural gas to produce liquid nitrogen and oxygen.

[26][27][20][28][29] First, he led the development of the Shah and Agrawal method to elucidate all feasible basic n-1 distillation column configurations for the separation of an n-component non-azeotropic mixture with n greater than 3,[30] and then in collaboration with professor Mohit Tawarmalani, developed optimization methods to rank-list these thousands to millions of configurations according to their heat duty, exergy, and cost.

[35][36] In analogy to multicomponent distillation configurations, he introduced membrane cascade schemes for multi-component gas separation.

Since joining Purdue University in 2004, Agrawal has focused on creating more energy-efficient and low-cost processes for generating renewable energy.

For the nanoparticle ink-based route, his group achieved the highest inorganic solar cell efficiencies for Cu2Zn(Sn,Ge)Se4 (9.4%) and Cu(In,Ga)Se2 (15%).

[46][47][48] His team was the first to synthesize (1) Cu2ZnSnS4 nanoparticles[49][50] and tailor the bandgap of Cu2ZnSnSe4 through partial substitution of Sn with Ge, and Cu with Ag;[51][52][53][54] and (2) promising Cu3AsS4 and their thin films for solar cells.

[75] Agrawal's international distinctions include the Distinguished Alumnus Award, Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur (2012), the inaugural Excellence in Gas Processing Award from the Annual Gas Processing Symposium, Qatar (2009), and the J&E Hall Gold Medal, Institute of Refrigeration, UK (2004).

[94] He is currently a member of the Technical Review Panel for the Materials, Chemicals, & Computational Science, National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL), Golden, CO, (2019–present).

He served on its Board of Directors (2006-2008);[102] and as a member of the Chemical Engineering Technology Operating Council (CTOC) (1999-2007) and as its Chair in 2002.

His service to National Science Foundation (NSF) includes serving on the Panel on Process Design and Control (2005), the workshop on Separations (2004),[113] and the international benchmarking study on Systems Engineering for Renewable and Clean Energy Manufacturing (SEEM), (2012).

He is a guest member of the European Federation of Chemical Engineering (EFCE) Working Party on Fluid Separations (2010–present).

He participated in the discussion of the Role of Indian Diaspora in Capacity Building for Affordable Solar Power at the 15th Pravasi Bharatiya Divas (PBD) Convention, Varanasi, India, January 2019.

[115]  He was a panelist on Sustainable Fuels as well as Advanced Materials sessions at Vaishvik Bhartiya Vaigyanik (VAIBHAV) Summit, in October 2020.