Request Expert

Expert has over 40 years of experience as a process engineer and project manager on new facilities for food, flavors, fragrances, fine chemicals, resins, and tall oils. He has taken the lead in driving R&D and manufacturing groups toward efficiency in capital and operating costs; operability, reliability, and maintainability; schedule; process safety and permitting; available technical and other resources. He is also experienced with conceptual engineering, preliminary capital and operating cost estimates and economic evaluations, process optimization with process flow diagrams (including material balances and batch cycles), equipment lists, utilities and environmental efforts, preliminary layouts, and definitive capital estimates. During and following Management approval, this information would be further refined and supplemented, and assembled as a "process" or "front end package" and transmitted (and explained) to an engineering company for detail design. Acting in a consulting/liaison role during construction, Expert would later be active in chemical plant troubleshooting during and after startup.

In any project, Expert selects, optimizes, designs/calculates and specifies standard and special chemical process equipment. This is usually done in two phases--first, in the preliminary design, where equipment is selected, optimized and "sized" in a preliminary fashion, to go with the development of the preliminary flow sketch, equipment list and estimate; then, during the detail design phase, I do (or, in a large project, supervise) the final design, specification and procurement of the equipment. This generally involves vendor input. He has designed many successfully operating reactors and agitators, pumps, heat exchangers of all kind (heaters/coolers, condensers, vaporizers/reboilers), separation equipment (fractionators, extractors, scrubbers etc.), and electrolytic equipment, etc.

Expert has done or supervised all kinds of plant cost (or, capital cost) estimates, from the "back of the envelope" type, through the preliminary, factored estimates to detailed estimates of varying degrees of precision. Due to his experience with many estimates over the years, Expert has developed a feel for all these kinds of estimates once he is familiar with the project, the plant site and the organization(s) involved. He is also good at reviewing estimates generated by others.

Expert has worked on fine chemicals projects for most of his career. Typically, he has worked in batch, multiple-use (as contrasted with dedicated use), retrofit facilities. The design of such facilities requires special flexibility, judgment and experience to arrive at a reliable, safe design while avoiding an excessive number of calculations (peak maxima and minima etc.). There were also typical special needs, like jacketing equipment and piping with steam or hot oil, chilled (refrigerated) condensers, steam tracing, automated reactor cleaning systems, metered liquid and solid reactor feed (some designed to handle sticky solids), or evolution of reactor vapors while feeding solids, etc.

Process safety and process safety management have been one of Expert's ongoing interests. On nearly every project, he has dealt with such issues as upper and lower explosive limits, reactor rupture disk sizing, testing and application of thermal stability and dust explosion parameters, design of rupture disk collection systems, etc. In recent years, he has dealt with HAZOP reviews, process safety management, and OSHA requirements.

Expert has in-depth knowledge of the process and mechanical design and specification of heat exchangers. He has designed numerous heat exchangers that are now operating successfully. In other cases, he provided process data to heat exchanger vendors who did the final specs.


On-site Consulting Over the past two decades Expert was, in effect, an "internal Employer". One example involved a situation in a plant that could not recover most of the solvent from a solution that typically barely covered the bottom dish of a large tank. The plant had proposed a new, expensive distillation system. Expert proposed the installation of a steam-heated exchanger in a line between an (existing) pump at the bottom of the tank to circulate the tank contents from that pump through the exchanger.In a large environmental project, He designed a unique, large 3-pass exchanger in a fouling process, with a 5 F approach. The exchanger has been operating successfully for over 20 years.He selected, designed and installed a glass system for a corrosive process on the Gulf Coast. This consisted of a glass distillation column and condenser, teflon lined pumps and piping.Based on discussions with plant operators and engineers and literature surveys, he eliminated one of two major reactors in the H2O2 process.Based on site studies, he demonstrated that it cost less to manufacture a specialty chemical in Kentucky than in France.