He had the second longest name I encountered at MIT.  (A fellow grad student has the longest one.)  Pierre Leonc Thibaut Brian.  He was known as P.L. Thibaut Brian, though.

Another PhD from MIT who joined the faculty, way back in 1956.  And, was also a Director of the School of Chemical Engineering Practice.  His research specialty was mass and heat transfer, associated with chemical reactions.  (In ChemE vernacular, this would be the confluence of transport phenomena with reaction kinetics.)

He also was a firm believer that computers would be critical in chemical engineering (we are talking about 45 years ago, folks), which helped his efforts in process control and numerical analysis.

Like Sam (Bodman), Thibaut’s experiences at the ChemE Practice school gave him fodder for writing a book.  Staged Cascades in Chemical Processing.  (The book, published in 1972, is out of print.)  A cascade, in Chem E parlance, is a plant that consists of several stages, where each stage processes the output of the prior stage.  These are fundamental to air separation, purification processes, distillation- even nuclear isotope separation.

Dr. Brian left MIT in 1972 to become the VP of Engineering at Air Products (in Pennsylvania).  Initially, his work involved air separation  (not surprising given the focus of the firm).  But, over the years, he devoted his efforts to improved safety for the chemical process industry and hazard analyses.  (It’s why Air Products had the best safety record in the industry.) 

While he remained in Allentown, Pennsylvania (as unbelievable as that sounds) even after he retired from Air Products after 22 years of tenure.  He died, in his snowbird status, while he was spending his time in Bradenton, Florida.

Bye, PLT!

Still time to cash in on my offer (detailed here).  The first step is to buy my book ($8.49 for the paper edition) which explains our new tax laws.

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