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CHEMICAL ENGINEERING DEPARTMENT The Chemical Engineering Department is located in the Jack E. Brown Chemical Engineering Building, a 205,000 square-foot building, prominently located at the corner of University Drive and Spence Street. The building's first floor houses six general use classrooms, four computer laboratories, and a 600 square-foot computer cluster room containing a 712 core supercomputer cluster. Department staff and faculty offices are located on the second floor, along with offices for the Mary Kay O'Connor Process Safety Center. Graduate student offices and research labs are located on floors three through seven, including 88 research and teaching facilities and 9 cleanrooms. In addition to individual faculty laboratories, the department supports two centers, and faculty have access to multi-user facilities across campus:

Chemical Engineering Facilities:

Mary Kay O'Connor Process Safety Center, Department of Chemical Engineering Chemicals play a key role in today’s high-tech world. The chemical industry is linked to every technologically advanced industry, and only a handful of the goods and services we enjoy on a daily basis would exist without essential chemical products. Furthermore, chemicals are a big business in Texas; where the state’s chemical complex is the largest in the world. The industry provides jobs for more than 85,000 Texans, and the state’s chemical products are shipped worldwide at a value of $15 billion dollars annually. The use of chemicals is a two-edged sword. Safe use creates a healthier economy and a higher standard of living. Unsafe use threatens our lives, our businesses and ultimately our world. For this reason, working and living safely with chemicals are the ultimate focus of the Mary Kay O’Connor Process Safety Center. The Mary Kay O’Connor Process Safety Center was established in 1995 in memory of Mary Kay O’Connor, an Operations Superintendent killed in an explosion on October 23, 1989 at the Phillips Petroleum Complex in Pasadena, TX. Mary Kay O’Connor graduated from the University of Missouri-Columbia with a degree in Chemical Engineering and received a MBA from the University of Houston-Clear Lake. The center’s mission is to promote safety as second nature in industry around the world with goals to prevent future accidents. In addition, the Center develops safer processes, equipment, procedures and management strategies to minimize losses within the processing industry. However, the center realizes that it is necessary to advance process safety technologies in order to keep the industry competitive. Other functions of the center include that it serves all stakeholders, provides a common forum, and develops programs and activities that will forever change the paradigm of process safety. The funding for the center comes from a combination of the endowment, consortium funding, and contract projects. Our programs and research activities enhance safety in the process industries. Our educational activities are aimed at making safety second nature to everyone in the industry. In addition, we develop safer processes, equipment, procedures and management strategies to minimize losses. We provide consultation services for small and medium enterprises, government agencies, institutions, local emergency planning committees and others agencies. Independent accident analysis services are also available to industry and government agencies, particularly for accidents suggesting new or complex phenomena.

Research Areas • Abnormal Situation Management Research • Chemical Incident Data Systems • Consequence Analysis • Corrosion • Engineering Sustainability • Explosions • Facility Siting • Flammability • High Expansion Foam Research • Human Factors • Inherent Safety Research • Layer of Protection Analysis • LNG Safety Research • Making a Business Case for Process Safety • Offshore Safety, Refinery Process Safety • Quantitative Risk Assessment • Reactive Chemical Research • Resilient Engineered Systems • Safety Climate

Gas & Fuels Research Center GFRC is a multidisciplinary research center led by Texas A&M University at Qatar involving 22 professors from Texas A&M University’s main campus in College Station and the University’s Qatar campus, and represents different engineering programs, including chemical engineering, petroleum engineering, material engineering and mechanical engineering. College Station facilities include: • A 43-meter long vertical loop for the study of the upward flow of gas-liquid mixture under conditions similar to the ones in a natural gas producing well affected by liquid loading. • Several analytical instruments that include HPLC, GC, temperature-controlled incubators, centrifuges, refrigerator/freezers, drying ovens, pH meters, biomass grinders, water baths, Rotovaps, Soxhlet extractors, and specialized pretreatment reactors. • A pilot-scale fermentation facility. • Combustion, Reaction and Characterization Lab with a scanning mobility particle sizer (SMPS) with condensation particle counter (CPC); a Hiden Catlab powder reactor system; a custom built two-stage powder reactor monitored by mass spectrometer; we are in the progress of finalizing a custom built bench scale core reactor monitored by FTIR. • Chemical Reaction Engineering laboratory for manufacturing and testing catalytic packed-bed reactors and membrane reactors, as well as analysis of permselective membrane materials via variable-pressure, constant-volume and Wilke-Kallenbach (constant pressure) permeation apparatus. The laboratory is also home to a suite of materials processing equipment for synthesizing ceramics and performing electrochemical analysis of solid-oxide electrolyte materials. • The Brazos computing cluster with 311 computing nodes with various processors with a total memory of 9,300 GB and total peak performance of about 28.1 Tflops. • Large amount of in-house developed and commercial simulation codes for the analysis, design, and optimization of various gas and fuel processes.

Multi-user Facilities:

Supercomputing Facilities TAMU HIGH PERFORMANCE RESEARCH COMPUTING This resource for research and discovery has four available clusters for faculty research: (1) Ada is a 874-node hybrid cluster from IBM/Lenovo with Intel Ivy Bridge processors and a Mellanox FDR-10 Infiniband interconnect. Ada includes 68 NVIDIA K20 GPUs supporting applications already ported to GPUs, and 24 Intel Xeon Phi 5110P co-processors supporting applications benefiting from Knights Corner Phi cards. (2) Terra is a 320-node heterogeneous Intel cluster from Lenovo with an Omni-Path Architecture (OPA) interconnect and 48 NVIDIA K80 dual-GPU accelerators. There are 304 nodes based on the Intel Broadwell processor and 16 nodes based on the Intel Knights Landing processor. (3) Curie is a 75-node IBM Power7+ cluster with a 10Gb Ethernet interconnect. Each node has two IBM 64-bit 8-core POWER7+ processors and 256 GB of memory. Curie's filesystems and batch scheduler are shared with the Ada cluster. (4) LoneStar5 is the latest cluster hosted by the Texas Advanced computing Center. Jointly funded by the University of Texas System, Texas A&M University and Texas Tech University, it provides additional resources to TAMU researchers. LoneStar5 has: 1252 Cray XC40 compute nodes, each with two 12-core Intel® Xeon® processing cores for a total of 30,048 compute cores; 2 large memory compute nodes, each with 1TB memory; 8 large memory compute nodes, each with 512GB memory; 16 Nodes with NVIDIA K- 40 GPUs; 5 Petabyte DataDirect Networks storage system; and Cray-developed Aries interconnect. The HPRC group provides its users with access to several specially configured "HPRC Lab" Linux workstations at two separate locations on the TAMU campus, and can assist with: debugging, code optimization and parallelization, batch processing, and collaborative advanced program support. BRAZOS HPC CLUSTER Brazos, a major computing cluster at Texas A&M University, is designed to meet the high- throughput computing needs of A&M's computational scientists and engineers. Though capable of executing modest MPI applications, Brazos is optimized for handling large numbers of single- node computations. The computing power of Brazos comes from 309 computing nodes, with processors ranging from quad core Intel Xeon (Harpertown) and AMD Opteron (Shanghai), to 8- core AMD Opteron (Bulldozer) with 16GB to 128GB per node. Total peak performance is about 31.3 TFlops with a total of 10.1TB of RAM. Access to Brazos is via a login nodes load balanced using round-robin DNS. User home directories are supported by a 5TB NFS file system. Data storage is supported using the Fraunhofer Filesystem on a 241TB storage array running on 7 storage nodes. Operating software for Brazos includes the Linux operating system, GNU and Intel compilers, SLURM batch scheduler, several MPI and linear algebra packages, and numerous applications. The compute nodes and servers of Brazos are connected internally via a modular switch, with Gigabit Ethernet connections to each compute node and 10GbE connections to the login node and the data fileservers. The login nodes are connected to the Science DMZ network with 10GbE. The networking fabric for a large portion of the Brazos cluster is DDR Infiniband.

MICROSCOPY & IMAGING CENTER (MIC) The mission of the Microscopy & Imaging Center (MIC) is to provide current and emerging technologies for teaching and research involving microscopy and imaging in Life and Physical Sciences on the Texas A&M campus and beyond, training and support services for microscopy, sample preparation, in situ elemental/molecular analyses, as well as digital image analysis and processing. This facility promotes cutting edge research in basic and applied sciences through research and development activities, as well as quality training and education through individual training, short courses and formal courses that can be taken for credit. Instruments available at the MIC include: • Light Microscopy o Zeiss Axiophot o Olympus FV1000 confocal microscope o Multiphoton non-linear optical microscope o Deconvolution o Nikon Stereo Photo Microscope • Scanning Electron Microscopy o FEI Quanta 600 FE-SEM o Tescan Vega3 SEM o Zyvex S100 Nanomanipulator • Transmission Electron Microscopy o FEI Tecnai G2 F20 FE Cryo-TEM o FEI Tecnai G2 F20 ST FE-TEM - Materials o JEOL 1200 EX TEM o JEOL JEM-2010 TEM o Analog & Digital Image Analysis o Ancillary Equipment • Correlative Light and Electron Cryo-Microscopy o FEI cryo-fluorescence stage on the Olympus microscope • Sample Preparation and Supporting Equipment o Cryo-prepartion for TEM, microtomes o Coaters, ion mill, polishers and other preparation tools o Image analysis tools

MATERIALS CHARACTERIZATION FACILITY The Materials Characterization Facility (MCF) at Texas A&M University is a multi-user facility located in the Frederick E. Giesecke Engineering Research Building (GERB) housing the fabrication and characterization instrumentation essential for the development, understanding, and study of new materials and devices. Specific instrumentation available include: Electron Microscopy: • Field Emission-Scanning Electron Microscope (FE-SEM)(JEOL JSM-7500F), • Lyra Focused Ion Beam-Scanning Electron Microscope (FIB-SEM) with an EDS Microanalysis System, • Fera Focused Ion Beam-Scanning Electron Microscope (FIB-SEM) with EBSD and Integrated Time-of-Flight Mass Spectrometer (ToF-SIMS), and • Electron microprobe with Wavelength Dispersive Spectroscopy (WDS)

Electron Microscopy • Field Emission Scanning Electron Microscope (FE-SEM with EDS) • Lyra Focused Ion Beam Microscope (FIB-SEM with EDS) • Fera FIB-SEM with EBSD and Time of Flight Mass Spectrometer (TOF-SIMS) • Electron Microprobe with EDS and WDS Thermal and Electrical Analysis • Thermal mechanical analysis (TMA) • Dynamic mechanical analysis (DMA) • Differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) • Dielectric spectroscopy • Hot Disc thermal conductivity analysis • Dielectric Spectrometer Surface Analysis • X-ray Photoelectron Spectroscopy (XPS)/Ultraviolet Photoelectron Spectroscopy (UPS) • Nanoindenter • Imaging ellipsometer • Cameca ion microprobe • Icon Atomic Force Microscope (AFM ) • Atomic Force Microscopy – Infrared Spectroscopy (AFM-IR) In-Situ Mechanical Testing • PI 95 PicoIndenter for TEM • PI 85 PicoIndenter for SEM • Tensile Stage 500 N (in situ/ex situ) • Tensile Stage 10 kN (in situ/ex situ) Spectroscopy & Microscopy • Spectrofluorometer • UV-Vis-NIR spectrophotometer • Raman confocal microscope • FTIR spectrometer • Fluorescent confocal microscope • Optical Microscope Sample Preparation Tools • LADD carbon evaporator • Struers LaboPol-5 polishing table • Diamond band saw • Powder press • Buehler hot mounting press • Nikon SMZ800N stereomicroscope • Nikon LV100 petrographic microscope • Epoxy disk preparation • Oven

TAMU POLYMER TECHNOLOGY CENTER At the Polymer Technology Center, we conduct research on high performance functional polymers for nanotechnology, biotechnology and micro-/nano-electronics packaging applications; surface damage phenomena of polymers; polymer surface to surface interaction forces; structure-property relationship in polymers, blends, polyolefin films, fiber-reinforced composites, adhesives and nanocomposites; strengthening and toughening of polymers; utilization of novel processing tools to enhance physical and mechanical properties of polymers. PTC Faculty members from various disciplines engage in a wide range of research including: Mechanical Testing Laboratory, Microscopy and Thermal Analysis Laboratory, Synthesis and Processing Laboratory, Rheology and Conductivity Laboratory, Sample Preparation Laboratory

TAMU CENTER FOR CHEMICAL CHARACTERIZATION AND ANALYSIS (CCCA), Department of Chemistry Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) Facility - The NMR Facility includes 10 superconducting spectrometer magnet systems, 4 LINUX workstations dedicated to data processing, and 3 full time staff to support them with maintenance, user training, and spectroscopic service. Although this facility is physically housed within the Chemistry Department, it provides services to the entire campus community. X-Ray Diffraction Laboratory - The lab is a full service X-ray Diffraction laboratory offering state of the art instrumentation for the analysis of solid materials. Our services include single-crystal and powder diffraction for Chemistry, Material Sciences and Pharmaceuticals. We are staffed by trained Ph.D. scientists who employ the most up to date diffraction and X-ray techniques. Please feel free to contact us about your diffraction needs. Chemistry Mass Spectrometry Facility - The services available include analyses of compounds ranging from small organic molecules to macromolecules including proteins, oligonucleotides, polymers and dendrimers. Instruments available include: Applied Biosystems PE SCIEX QSTAR; Thermo Scientific DSQ II GCMS; and Thermo Scientific LCQ-DECA Center for Mass Spectrometry - is dedicated to providing cutting-edge technology and expertise for the characterization of molecules to fulfill the needs of researchers at TAMU. Mass spectrometry (MS) plays an increasingly important role in molecular level research, and it is central to ‘omics’ research, i.e., petroleomics, proteomics, metabolomics, lipidomics, glycomics, etc and the CMS provides expert staff with modern instrumentation to complete these tasks . Instruments available include: Thermo Scientific Fusion; Bruker 9.4T FT-ICR MS; MDS-Sciex 4000 Qtrap; and Applied Biosystems 4800+ MALDI TOF/TOF MS. Elemental Analysis - The laboratory provides research support in the area of elemental and trace analysis as well as service analyses to TAMU users, other university and government agencies and private industry. It is unique in that it features fast neutron activation analysis (FNAA) capabilities in addition to thermal instrumental neutron activation (INAA) using the University's Nuclear Science Center 1 MW TRIGA research reactor. In addition, the laboratory has recently added inductively-coupled plasma - mass spectrometry to its stable of facilities. The ICP-MS has been fitted with both conventional sample introduction hardware for solution work as well as a 213 nm laser ablation system for studying solids and surfaces.

INSTITUTE FOR MOLECULAR AND DEVELOPMENTAL BIOLOGY (IDMB), (http://research.tamu.edu/centers/institute-of-developmental-and-molecular-biology/) Department of Biology – The IDMB provides state-of-the-art equipment and services to the research and teaching community of TAMU through its component laboratories, the Gene Technologies Laboratory (GTL), and the Rice Biotechnology Laboratory (RBL). The IDMB hosts researchers from other institutions interested in developmental and molecular biology, especially relative to transgenic rice, and the role of chromatin in gene expression and gene silencing. The GTL houses automated sequencers and DNA extraction equipment and provides inexpensive services to some 150 researchers in the Texas A&M community. Services available through the GTL include the following: • DNA Sequencing • Client Performed Reactions Form • GTL Performed Reactions Form • Oligonucleotide Ordering • AutoGenprep 850 alpha • access to MJ Research thermal cyclers • discount purchase of sequencing reagents • access to Sequencher DNA sequencing software • technical consultation