Physical Property Models to Design Better Chemical Products

"Refrigerants, shaving gels, light bulbs, inks, and fuels: these are just some of the chemical products we use each day. Exciting new chemical products such as artificial blood, energy efficient carbon dioxide absorption solvents, high performance rocket fuels, and enhanced heat transfer fluids are currently being researched. But what exactly are chemical products? How are these products designed? And how can we design even better chemical products?

Designing chemical products has always been a challenging task. Traditionally, the design process would require decades of product specific knowledge and a considerable amount of trial and error experimentation. Today we are developing more systematic, scientific approaches to chemical product design. Software tools can generate tens of thousands of candidate molecular structures and mixture formulations. Structure property relationships can be used to computationally predict the properties of each candidate and screen them against constraints on performance, safety, and environmental impact. Promising candidates can then be screened using additional tools to ensure they can be produced in an efficient and sustainable manner.

Many chemical engineers never think about how we can contribute to the design of chemical products. We know we can design the processes that make these chemical products, but what about designing the products themselves? I hope to show how basic chemical engineering knowledge, e.g., knowledge of thermodynamics, transport theory, safety, and environmental analyses and, most importantly, physical properties, is essential to the design of effective and efficient chemical products. Some examples will show: how knowledge of rheology is used to design aircraft anti-icing fluids; how knowledge of phase equilibria is used to design shaving cream; how knowledge of emulsion stability is used to design blood substitutes."

For more than 30 years, Dr. Kevin Joback has worked in the areas of physical property estimation and chemical product design. He has developed several group contribution estimation techniques now widely used in industry. He has designed numerous chemical products including environmentally friendly cleaning and separation solvents, new lubricants, enhanced thermal storage materials, improved jet and rocket fuels, and non-hazardous aircraft deicing fluids. Dr. Joback holds a bachelor’s degree from Stevens Institute of Technology, a master’s degree from MIT, and a PhD also from MIT. All his degrees are in chemical engineering. He is currently president of Molecular Knowledge Systems, Inc. 

This meeting is free and open to all, not just to Virtual Local Section members.