Prof. Kalyan Annamalai | Metabolism | Best Researcher Award

Texas A&M University, Mech Engg.,, College Station, United States

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Academic and Professional Background

Prof. Kalyan Annamalai, Professor Emeritus at Texas A&M University, received his Ph.D. from Georgia Tech, later conducting research at Brown University before joining Texas A&M in 1981. In 2005, he was competitively appointed as the Paul Pepper Professor. During his Fall 2013 sabbatical, he served as a Visiting Scholar at MIT’s Energy Laboratory. He is the author of two influential books—“Advanced Thermodynamics” and “Combustion Science and Engineering”—along with over 116 scholarly articles and 158 peer-reviewed conference publications. His interdisciplinary research spans from the respiratory quotient (RQ) and global CO₂ budget to second-law-based lifespan predictions and the application of group combustion principles to organ metabolism.

Research and Innovations

Prof. Annamalai’s research has advanced energy conversion through oxygen-deficient (OD) combustion, including group combustion modeling for both fossil fuels and biological systems. He holds a U.S. patent for NOx reduction using animal waste, achieving up to 90% reduction. He extended the Respiratory Quotient (RQ) concept, commonly used in biology (RQ ≈ 0.8 for humans), to evaluate fossil fuel emissions in tons of CO₂ per GJ. From Keeling’s atmospheric CO₂/O₂ data, he derived the Global RQ (≈ 0.47), providing a thermodynamic basis for the Earth’s carbon cycle and offering explanations for its climate response and axial tilt due to fossil fuel mining. His innovative application of the Second Law of Thermodynamics enabled entropy-based lifespan predictions. By linking OD combustion models to organ-level cell clouds, he addressed two fundamental biological puzzles: how organs scale metabolic rates across body sizes and why energy release per kg of organ mass declines with size. Medical practitioners can now use a defined “G_OD” number from his study “Secrets of Kleiber’s Law” to quantify organ oxygen deficiency.

Interdisciplinary Contributions

Driven by scientific curiosity, especially after retirement, Prof. Annamalai ventured into cross-disciplinary frontiers. Despite limited support due to political and institutional hurdles, he bridged engineering thermodynamics with biological metabolism. He discovered similarities between Specific Energy Release Rates (SERR) of fossil fuels and Specific Organ Metabolic Rates (SOMR). His work showed how oxygen-deficient combustion engineering principles could explain biological scaling laws, including the Kleiber’s law puzzle of whole-body metabolic rate adjustments across species. Remarkably, using just data from a 2 g shrew and a 390 g rat, his model predicted SOMR for 116 species, validating Lindstedt and Schaeffer’s hypothesis: that a blue whale and a tiny shrew operate on fundamentally similar biochemical processes.

Research Areas

His key research domains include: energy conversion from coal, animal waste, mesquite, and renewables; NOx reduction technologies using biomass reburning; and interdisciplinary approaches that apply the Second Law to lifespan prediction, as well as the oxygen-deficient combustion model to biological systems.

Professional Memberships

Prof. Annamalai is an active member of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) and the Combustion Institute, Pittsburgh, reflecting his longstanding contributions to both engineering and combustion science.

Notable Publications

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Secrets of Kleiber’s and Maximum Metabolic Rate Allometries Revealed with a Link to Oxygen-Deficient Combustion Engineering

Author: Kalyan Annamalai

Journal: Oxygen

Year: 2025

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Secrets of Kleiber’s and Maximum Metabolic Rate Allometries Revealed with a Link to Oxygen-Deficient Combustion Engineering

Author: Kalyan Annamalai

Journal: Preprints

Year: 2025

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Breathing Planet Earth: Analysis of Keeling’s Data on CO2 and O2 with Respiratory Quotient (RQ), Part II: Energy-Based Global RQ and CO2 Budget

Author: Kalyan Annamalai

Journal: Energies

Year: 2024

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Breathing Planet Earth: Analysis of Keeling’s Data on CO2 and O2 with Respiratory Quotient (RQ), Part I: Global Respiratory Quotient (RQGlob) of Earth

Author: Kalyan Annamalai

Journal: Energies

Year: 2024

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Reburning of Animal Waste Based Biomass with Coal for NOx Reduction, Part I: Feedlot Biomass (FB) and Coal:FB Blends

Authors: Hyukjin Oh, Kalyan Annamalai, Paul G. Goughner, Ben Thien, John M. Sweeten

Journal: Energies

Year: 2021

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Oxygen Deficient (OD) Combustion and Metabolism: Allometric Laws of Organs and Kleiber’s Law from OD Metabolism?

Author: Kalyan Annamalai

Journal: Systems

Year: 2021