1 Chemical engineering matters everywhere - reflections on a journey from academe to industry, and back again Institution of Chemical Engineers Presidential Address, May 28th 2014 Professor Geoffrey Maitland FREng FIChemE 1. Introduction How did I come to be standing here? I think it was John Lennon who once observed that life is what happens when you are planning something else – I know exactly what he was talking about. For the last nine years I have been professor of energy engineering at Imperial College London, carrying out research with my students and colleagues, many of whom are here tonight, on a variety of topics right across the energy landscape, from clean fossil fuels to green algae as a source of renewable hydrogen. To explain how I came to this life of engineering and to be working on what I consider to be probably the most important challenge facing the world in this 21st Century, I want to take you all on a journey, which began in Stoke-on-Trent in the 1940’s, and tell you about some of the doors that opened up along the way. And I want to use this journey to comment on some of the challenges and opportunities for chemical engineers today and what I would like to achieve for the Institution and our profession as your President. 2. Early beginnings… a first taste of Engineering As Dylan Thomas said, “To begin at the beginning…” I was born in Stoke, the Potteries, so you will not be surprised to learn that my father worked in the pottery industry, at a company called Podmore and Sons. They made and processed the raw materials for making pottery…the clays, the refractory frits and the glazes. As a youngster, we lived opposite the Podmore factory and I can remember my mother moaning because whenever the dull background noise of the ball mills and furnaces stopped in the middle of the night, my father, the works manager at the time, used to wake up and go across the road to sort things out – way before remote computer control, he had his own in-built sensor system that there was a problem. This connection to Podmores opened a door to some summer vacation work and was my first exposure to both industrial chemistry and to engineering. My time at Podmores presented me with two other opportunities. I wrote my first book – the excitingly titled Ceramicists Handbook, which documents such engineering delights as degrees Twaddle and Von Kobell’s scale of mineral fusibility. And at school I won the 6th Form English Essay Prize for 1964 with an account of the design and operation of vibro- energy mills, a Podmore invention to replace traditional rotating ball mills for grinding zirconium sand for glazes, which I had been assigned to test out that summer…much to the chagrin of 2 my Lower 6th Arts friends, who thought that a prize for English Essay ought to be about Shakespeare or Gladstone. So I guess this was an early appreciation of the value of explaining complex science and engineering to non-technical people. Probably the most famous Stoke Potter was Josiah Wedgwood, one of the great engineering entrepreneurs of the industrial revolution. A Fellow of the Royal Society, Wedgwood was responsible for the industrialization of the ceramics industry in England and played a large role setting up much of the rail and canal infrastructure which was essential for the widespread impact of engineering in that era. He was second to none in lobbying parliament and raising venture capital…so we should not forget that the impact of engineering in the 19th Century owed much to the political persuasiveness and entrepreneurial skills of the engineers, as well as to their great engineering inventions. In our current era of the electronic revolution, where I contend that we desperately need to accelerate the energy revolution, we need to restore the political influence of engineers to create the right environment to bring about engineering change which is not necessarily driven entirely by the market. Actually the most famous Stoke Potter is not, Josiah Wedgwood. It is, of course, Sir Stanley Matthews, the Wizard of Dribble, the very first European footballer of the year in 1956 and one of the greatest players world football has ever seen. In fact my father played against Matthews when they were at school. He first took me to the Victoria Ground when I was about six years old. Despite getting soaking wet on the uncovered Stoke End watching a goalless draw against Bury in the old 2nd Division, I was hooked and I have remained a proud, long- suffering supporter all my life. A difficult cross to bear at times but football can be a metaphor for life more generally and being a Stoke supporter definitely prepares you for life’s disappointments – and I suppose makes you thankful for small mercies. 3 So let’s look at one of the barometers of my journey – Stoke’s league position since 1947. Quite a bumpy ride! Although they finished 4th in the old first division in the year of my birth, still their highest position ever, Matthews left Stoke for Blackpool one month after I was born, and for the first 14 years of my life it was all downhill. But then, a miracle happened. In October 1961, Stoke’s manager Tony Waddington managed to persuade Matthews, then aged 46, to return to Stoke – and the rest is history. In my vibro-energy days at Podmores, in 1963 Stoke were promoted back to the old first division – the Premier League to those of you under 30 – after ten years in the wilderness. Life was on the up. For the record, on my other journey barometer which we will come to later, crude oil was trading at $1.8 per barrel. 3. Research to Academe to Industry and back again Amidst all of this euphoria, my love of science, and chemistry in particular, led me to study the subject in Oxford, whose delights, particularly watching cricket in the Parks, I enjoyed so much that I stayed on to acquire a doctorate in physical chemistry. My supervisor and mentor was Sir Brian Smith who taught me many things, including how exciting and rewarding research can be, how you need to take risks to make step changes, how to combine rigour with pragmatism, how not to tackle at 5-a-side football and how to bend your first serve both ways. My focus on energy moved on from vibro-energy to the energy between molecules and how this determines the transport and thermophysical 4 properties of fluids – a topic that has stayed with me throughout my career. I could not exactly claim to be working on industrial fluids at that stage though – mainly on inert gases in fact. I gained my first real-world contact with industry courtesy of an ICI research fellowship at Bristol University, jumping from argon to large polymers. Then in 1974 I was recruited by Anthony Pearson to join the Chemical Engineering Department at Imperial College. He offered me a lectureship in polymer rheology (or as my first grant appeared in the Imperial Reporter – ‘polymer theology’). Stoke’s fortunes were on the up too. As I moved to Bristol, Stoke won their first – and to date only – major trophy, the 1972 League Cup, and on my arrival at Imperial had finished 5th in the old first division…almost back to where they were when I was born! The oil price was also on the up, heading for $12 bbl as a result of the OPEC embargo. I thought I was going to be a chemist for life but Pearson had opened the door to chemical engineering and I had walked straight through it. Again I was really lucky – not only did Anthony open my eyes to the world of engineering and how to tackle engineering problems that need to be solved rather than scientific problems that can be solved, but he also shared with me his industrial contacts, particularly at ICI and Unilever. I had started research in polymer reactor engineering and in 1979 ICI asked me to join them on a two year secondment. Another unexpected door had opened, this time to life on PVC plants – Imperial agreed and so again I walked through it. ICI, sadly no longer with us, but in its time of course the flagship of the UK chemical industry, can help us see the enormous changes in chemical engineering that have taken place over my lifetime and how the vision and ingenuity of our profession has transformed the way industrial processes are designed, optimized and controlled. Let’s quickly look at an example from the ICI archives: 5 This is an advert from 1954 called Silent Witnesses. This shows how process monitoring and control, and the life of process operators, have changed radically over the years and brings home just how relatively crude process monitoring and control was only fifty years ago and how chemical engineering has exploited the electronic revolution in both sensors and computing power to make processes more precise, safe, productive and less wasteful…all in my lifetime. My secondment with ICI, working on optimizing PVC reactors at Runcorn and Welwyn, was an invaluable experience and I returned to Imperial in 1981 with enough polymer research problems to keep me going for a lifetime. Here you see Margaret Thatcher, taking a breather from the miners’ strike, visiting Imperial in early 1985 and being enthralled with a demonstration (of another sort) of measuring flow in stirred polymerization reactors given by myself and my very young colleague Stephen Richardson.