During my youth, as a mass- and heat-transfer R&D manager, there were 12 occasions when new technologies were sold for the very first time. One or two of those technologies might have been considered “breakthroughs.” The others were very significant…
There is an emerging crisis brewing for the chemical processing industries (CPI) in many regions of the world. Those regions include China, the world’s manufacturing powerhouse; swaths of the U.S., including large parts of its South; and chunks of Europe.…
Seeking input on distillation education Right now, distillation engineers are extremely busy — globally, and especially in the U.S. The AIChE Distillation Symposium (May, San Antonio, Tex.) that was organized by Henry Kister and Mike Pritchett had an amazing number…
Have you ever participated in a team-building exercise, the type where Human Resources personnel teach a group of individuals how to work better together? I’ll bet that during my career I participated in about ten such exercises, but right now…
Lessons learned Your Editor’s Page in today’s Chemical Engineering [March 2013, p.5] intrigued me because I too served as a TA in a physical chemistry lab but long before 1980 and we did not have the luxury of a Fourier-transform…
Some injuries are permanent; some injuries are total. People who work for, or near, small companies need to be protected just as much as those associated with large companies. Small companies, however, usually cannot afford to employ full-time, certified, degreed,…
Respiratory Protection* ... OSHA requires employers to institute engineering and work practice controls as the primary means to reduce and maintain employee exposures to air contaminants to levels at or below the OSHA permissible exposure limits (PELs). Primary reliance on…
In his keynote presentation at this year’s ARC Forum (February 11–14, Orlando, Fla.; www.arcweb.com), Andy Chatha, president and founder of ARC, stated that there were over ten billion WiFi-connected devices in 2012 and that over 50 billion are expected by…
Richard Belzer, of the television program Law and Order, authored a book entitled “UFOs, JFK and Elvis: Conspiracies You Don’t Have to be Crazy to Believe.” I remember reading and enjoying the book. The author contended that there are five-sided…
It was Terry Thurber’s idea. It was a bad idea. But Bob Miller and Nick Urbanski taught me many years ago that, in the research and development (R&D) world, bad ideas are often the best ideas. Install things upside down…