Hydrocarbon Processing - September 2022 - 145

Industry Pioneers
gines, industrial machinery and wind turbines.76
Besides being a
trailblazing industrial chemist who has contributed significantly
to advanced synthetic lubricants, she has pioneered as one of the
first women to work in this field. When she joined Mobil, she
was one of only three women chemists with doctorate degrees.
She held the position of Senior Scientific Adviser, the first
woman to achieve this position, which is the highest technical
rank in her company. Over the course of her career, Wu earned
more than 100 patents. Post-retirement, she continued as an
emeritus and consultant until 2016 and was inducted into the
National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2022.77
IRWIN M. LACHMAN, RODNEY BAGLEY
AND RONALD M. LEWIS
Irwin Lachman, Rodney
Bagley and Ronald M.
Lewis-a team of researchers
working at Corning
Glass Works Co.-invented
the ceramic substrate inside catalytic converters. Their work
was instrumental in developing efficient, feasible and the firstever
mass-produced automotive catalytic converters.
Catalytic converters are devices that convert combustion
products in automotive exhaust to less environmentally polluting
components. Their research was a response to the Clean Air
Act of 1970 that aimed to reduce pollutants from automotive
exhausts by 95%. The team's invention enabled the automotive
industry to meet these standards set by the Clean Air Act.78
Lachman, Bagley and Lewis used cellular ceramic technology
to create the ceramic honeycomb that became the essential
core component of catalytic converters. The team worked
to develop a new ceramic material to achieve the key characteristics
needed: high-temperature durability, low thermal expansion,
low thermal conductivity at high temperatures, light
weight and controlled porosity.
Lachman identified that ceramics could be ideally suited to
meet the demands of the application. Their work leveraged the
superior resistance of ceramic materials to dynamic and extreme
temperature fluctuations and provided a well-designed surface
for catalytic conversion of combustion products. Ceramics offer
the unique property of very low thermal expansion, making
them extremely resistant to thermal shock, which is a necessary
requirement for durability.
Lewis discovered that inducing the proper preferred orientation
of crystallites in the substrate is key to achieving low
thermal expansion, thus high resistance to extreme temperature
fluctuations. Ceramic also provides a textured surface for the
catalyst, is phase stable, resistant to corrosion and can withstand
very high operating temperatures.
Bagley developed the process and the extrusion die to make
thin-walled, honeycombed cellular ceramic substrates. The
design consists of thousands of cellular channels through the
structure, allowing for a large surface area. The inside surface of
the channels was coated with a catalyst for conversion of polluting
fuel combustion products into less harmful emissions such
as carbon dioxide (CO2
), nitrogen and water vapor.
The ceramic substrate used a platinum catalyst and required
the removal of lead from gasoline to avoid poisoning the catalyst.
The substrate technology served two purposes: to reduce
pollutants from the fuel combustion process by 95% and to reduce
lead pollution. Today, every car company relies on ceramic
technology to control exhaust emissions and the fundamental
ceramic technology extends to substrates for trucks, buses, passenger
vehicles and other similar applications. Since the 1970s,
vehicles employing advanced emissions control through catalyst
conversion have reduced pollutants by over 3 Bt worldwide.79
Lachman, Bagley and Lewis were inducted into the National
Inventors Hall of Fame in 2002 and received the National Medal
of Technology in 2003.80
LARRY EVANS
after the project was completed.81
Larry Evans, Professor of chemical engineering at
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT),
is known as the founder of ASPEN Technology. In
1976, Evans led the Advanced System for Process
Engineering (ASPEN) project as the principal investigator;
founding Aspen Technology in 1981
The ASPEN Project was a major
research and development project initiated in response to the
energy crises in the 1970s and funded at the cost of $6 million by
the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and 65 other companies
in the process industry across the world.81
The objective of the
project was to develop a third-generation process modeling and
simulation system to create a state-of-the-art process simulator
with advanced infrastructure and capabilities for any process industry.
The project focused particularly on the technical and
economic evaluation of proposed synthetic fuel processes.
Evans and his collaborators had a vision that computer-aided
automation should be applied to chemical engineering. The potential
application of that vision was in process engineering and
manufacturing-the energy, chemicals and other industries
that use a chemical process. This vision found an opportunity
when market requirements changed following the oil shock and
economic and political disruptions caused by it, which led to
the creation of the Energy Laboratory at MIT.
Professor Evans built a team comprised of engineers, project
faculty professional staff, post-docs and students, to develop
software solutions to solve complex chemical engineering problems.
The purpose of the ASPEN project was to develop a general
process simulation system that could be used by chemical
engineers across the process industries. The project resulted in
a next-generation simulator that could simulate complex processes
for highly non-ideal mixtures, solids, electrolytes, multiphase
systems, chemicals, coal conversions and synthetic fuel
processes. In 1981, Evans and seven key members of his team
founded Aspen Technology to license the technology from
MIT and to further develop and commercialize it.82
Evans led
the company as the Chief Executive Officer (CEO), fulfilling
the company's mission to provide cutting-edge software-based
process engineering tools and technologies to enable processes
engineers to design new processes and improve efficiency and
productivity of existing plants.
Under his leadership, the company grew into the leading supplier
of engineering, manufacturing and supply chain software.
The goal of the company focused on process optimization and
eventually broadened to include asset optimization and management.
Evans has received several prestigious awards recognizing
his performance and leadership at AspenTech. He was inducted
Hydrocarbon Processing's Centennial Anniversary | SEPTEMBER 2022 145
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