Commentary
September Letters
Re: Education needs a reality check... I would like to pass on a few comments on Jason Makansi’s letter titled “Education needs a reality check”, which appeared in the August 2012 edition (p. 6). I too, like Jason, began my…
Try harder to stay awake
Nobody would have ever called Denny proactive. He wasn’t even reactive. He was barely active in any sense of the word. A majority of his acquaintances would have, in fact, called him inactive. Nevertheless, Denny was on our sales team,…
Education needs a reality check
From August 2012 Letters to the Editor Three years after receiving my B.S.Ch.E. degree from Columbia University, and working in industry for a power company and at a refinery, I was asked to give a talk to the New York…
Writing your employees’ resumes
My June 2011 editorial (CE, p. 27) recommended the hiring of happy people. It included a photograph of the present FRI technician staff. After a recent safety meeting, I handed all staff members fresh copies of their resumes. Once they…
Design practices committee
Where do middle boilers go? If you answered, “Nobody knows”, then you’re wrong. FRI’s Design Practices Committee (DPC) knows — and they’re willing to share. The DPC was formed in 1975. It originally contained just six members. Neil Yeoman was…
A very confined space
Circa 1978, Reese and I visited a petrochemical plant in Corpus Christi, Texas. Primarily, our job was to inspect trays that had been installed in three columns. Each of those columns was about 10 ft in diameter and 100 ft…
Magic trays, brown solvent
Every five years or so, a call would come in and once again I would be troubleshooting a certain extraction unit in Canada — usually in the dead of winter. This particular unit had a liquid-liquid extractor, a stripper, a…
Acid gas absorption expert
I will bet that many readers are familiar with a Teddy Roosevelt quote that includes the following: “It is not the critic who counts…the credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena...” Ralph Weiland has been in…
Packing must fail
For the first half of my career, I worked in a group that developed, designed and sold distillation trays. Late during the 1970s, half of that group’s business disappeared — almost overnight — when structured packing replaced trays in very…
Graduate students’ journey to the U.S.
I was whining to myself, and to anybody who would listen, about the 20 to 30 projects that I have on my desk at all times. Then I met Ms. Regina Henry, who is the coordinator of immigration at Oklahoma…