Fractionation and Distillation

From the time I was transferred north from the LA area, except for the initial training period in San Francisco, I was engaged in chemical engineering research. This was true as long as I was nominally attached to the SF office, even though I was spending time either at the experimental tray test column at Emeryville or at the laboratory in south Berkeley.

At SF there wasn’t a chemical engineering department as such — it wasn’t until the transfer to Emeryville was made that this was formalized. However both at SF and Emeryville this research was under the direction of Matt Saunders, who was one of the more notable individuals I knew at Shell, or for that matter in the field of chemical engineering. He was a paraplegic, having been injured by a shotgun blast to his lower spinal area as a young person, probably in his early teens.

Despite this handicap of spending the rest of his days in a wheelchair, he entered the engineering field and his doctoral work was the pioneering work in the development of a truly scientific basis for assessing the capacity of distillation equipment. He had first worked for Shell at Wilmington where I started but he had transferred to SF by the time I arrived on the scene.

He was a man of rather slight statute, I’d guess he never weighed more than 100 pounds. Personality-wise he was a very considerate, even kindly person, and I was fortunate in having him over me in management. Between him (as department head in chemical engineering) and me there was Robert Olney as supervisor. Olney was actually also a graduate of Iowa and he was in the master’s degree program there during my senior year.

A preponderant part of the chemical engineering research I was associated with related to the design of distillation equipment (from the standpoint of capacity or throughput, associated characteristics such as pressure drop, and tray efficiency — thus it was different from “paper” research on computer programs for theoretical tray calculations) but it also included the design of extraction equipment and liquid/solid contacting.

The work, particularly that in the field of distillation equipment, led, perhaps inevitably, to my becoming an expert in the field. As a result I formulated, in conjunction with others, the design manuals for various types of distillation equipment and for extraction equipment that were used in Shell USA. During this period Shell also belonged to an inter-industry research group called Fractionation Research Inc. which was on the premises of the C.F. Braun company (one of the premier chemical construction firms at the time — thought it lost its position in subsequent years). This group had meetings several times a year to discuss its program and results and over the years I attended a good fraction of them — they were held in various places in the Midwest and wester USA such as LA, Dallas, Tulsa, Houston, etc.).

The research at Emeryville was coordinated with work at Shell Oil’s Houston refinery and this results in trips to Houston and New York in relation the work at the different locations. The trip to Holland thatI made in 1954 was also in the area of relating the experimental work which was being done at Emeryville with the work being done at the Delft laboratory (near the Hague) by the Dutch part of Royal Dutch/Shell. 

This trip which lasted about 2-1/2 months came at a less-than-propitious time for Jean and me. Jean was pregnant with Muriel, indeed in the last trimester, and Shell felt that it would be unwise for her to accompany me on the trip. Had it not been for this she would likely have come along, and I daresay the time in Holland would have been extended. Actually in retrospect I think that she could well have made the trip even though she was pregnant and Muriel might have been born in Holland rather than at Alta Bates in Berkeley.