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Expert's 20 years of experience in the Process Engineering Department of Dow Corning Corporation was directed at process technology development and implementation. The development effort encompassed the process idea through thermodynamic studies and lab kinetic studies to get basic reactor design criteria and later conducting pilot scale-up runs, when necessary. The implementation effort covered safely running the new production-scale process to prove its design capability, and later turning the resulting successful process over to the production staff. Both batch and continuous processes were implemented for highly exothermic processes. A few of the processes were implemented at sites outside of the U.S.

His career activities have focused on using his fundamental organic chemistry knowledge toward R&D into applied organic chemistry and chemical reaction engineering. The Dow Corning Corporation process targets were mainly organosilicon intermediates, also known as silanes. In that capacity, much of his process development activity was directed at silane chemistry applications, largely in the form of addition reaction catalysis, using primarily heterogeneous catalysts. Expert also studied other organometallic processes and those involving handling reactive alkali metals and alkaline earth metals where he acquired much scale-up experience.

In addition to organosilicon processes, Expert’s experience also encompasses processes to produce certain alkyl halides as building blocks for producing the desired organofluorine olefin compounds. The latter are useful as reactants with certain silanes to produce important fluorosilicone fuel-resistant materials. As such, his studies have covered various free radical processes to produce organochlorine compounds and, subsequently, various thermal and fluidized bed, vapor-phase fluorination processes using anhydrous HF to produce the organofluorine compounds.

His studies covered the breadth of processes involving organochlorine chemistry through chlorofluorocarbon chemistry to organofluorine chemistry. Expert acquired much experiential knowledge of various analytical techniques to characterize these halogenated materials, with and without silicon present, and later that knowledge aided his process problem-solving capabilities to tackle process problems that occasionally arose in R&D or in plant production-scale operations.


Expert has lead and personally conducted a variety of process development projects from lab-scale to plant-scale in U.S. and non-U.S. sites. He has safely dealt with difficult separations and particularly hazardous materials. Dow Corning promoted him to Engineering Scientist status (one of eight) to recognize his mentoring and leadership of people and projects.