ChemE.info - Chemical Engineering Consulting

My name is Doug Denholm. My background is in chemical engineering and computer software. You can get the usual overview of my professional background by checking out my resume.

My interests are pretty varied (I like military and naval history, for example) but I set up ChemE.info as a platform my interest in software and its application to chemical engineering.

Recently I have been very impressed with the advent and growth of the Open Source software movement. In case you are not familiar with the Open Source concept, it is a new business model for the development and commercialization of software. Whole articles and books have been written about it but, in essence, it is a movement away from the idea of generating revenue by licensing software. (I will post blog entries expanding on this and pointing out articles that further explain the concept.)

As you may be aware, the greatest area of application for Open Source has been in general information technology including things like:

• Operating Systems: e.g. Linux and Solaris
• Web Technology: e.g. Apache web server
• Scripting Languages: e.g. Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby
• Customer Relationship Management (CRM): e.g. Sugar CRM

There has been, alas, very little development and even less acceptance of Open Source in the area of engineering software.

With that in mind, I set up the opensource.cheme.info web forum back in March of 2005. It is intended to provide a starting point for people wanting to see what is available in the way of Open Source chemical engineering software and as a place for people to post announcements about same.

My background

I am a third generation engineer. My grandfather was a radio and electrical engineer. My father is an electrical engineer and physicist. I graduated from MIT with two degrees in Chemical Engineering back in the late 70’s and I received my Professional Engineer’s license in the early 1980’s. My engineering career can be divided into three phases.

First Phase

During the first phase was pretty hands-on in the sense that I was working at the bench and pilot scale building and operating actual equipment. For example, I was involved in buildng and operating the following:

• lab-scale coal pyrolysis and hydropyrolysis furnace (MIT Energy Lab)
• pilot-scale fluid-bed cellulose pyrolysis reactor (Energy Resources, Inc.)
• pilot-scale photo-chemical web coaters (Polaroid Corp.)
• lab-scale controlled-environment “glass” reactors for photochemical systems (Polaroid Corp.)
• pilot-scale molten boron-oxide glass spinning apparatus (Kennecott Development Corp.)

Second Phase

My work involved more process design and development and I started to combine that with computer programming and simulation.

• Designed the commercial-scale regeneration system for the CUPROSUL copper-sulfide-based H2S scrubbing system (EIC Laboratories, Inc.)
• Developed a GW Basic program for simulating the CUPROSUL process (EIC Laboratories, Inc.)
• Designed and simulated (ASPEN PLUS) the gas-scrubbing system for the KilnGas rotary kiln coal gasification process (Allis Chalmers)
• Simulated (MAPPS) and designed improvements for various pulp & paper mills (Champion International)
• Analyzed, simulated (VisiCalc), and improved rotary and fluid-bed calciners (Champion International)

This was mostly at the plant/commercial scale and, in many cases, involved onsite data collection for validating the analysis and modeling effort.

Third Phase

I worked for 12 years at Aspen Technology, Inc. as it grew from a small MIT start-up (I was employee number 45) to something much larger (by the time I left AspenTech had nearly 1,600 employees and offices in several countries).

I was a founding member and later manager of AspenTech’s Applications group. Our role, in the early years, was to prove to customers that Aspen Plus (our flagship product) could be used to simulate their particular plants and processes. This was very important as AspenTech attempted to establish itself in markets around the world.

A number of these simulation models were quite complex involving dozens of unit operation blocks and many recycle streams.

This was a very interesting time for us. During this period, I was responsible for the following simulation projects:

• Badger-type Ethylbenzene/Styrene plant - Japan
• Coke-oven gas scrubbing - Hoogovens, The Netherlands
• Coal Liquefaction process - BHP/DPIE, Australia
• Polybutylene Terephthalate - GE Plastics, USA
• Ammonia Plant - Japan
• Ammonia Plant - SINOPEC, China
• Styrene Plant - Huntsman, USA
• Silanes Plant - GE Silanes, Holland
• Propylene Oxide Reactors - Repsol, Spain
• Nitric Acid Plant - Japan
• Nitric Acid Plant - Finland
• Bauxite Plant - Nabalco, Australia
• Vinyl Chloride Plant - South Africa

There were actually quite a few more than that but those are the ones that stick in my mind.

The work at AspenTech involved a lot of travel (e.g. Finland, Sweden, Norway, Germany, Holland, Spain, South Africa, Kuwait, Japan, China, Canada, Mexico, and Australia) which could be exhausting but was very interesting. It also involved working with engineers from a wide range of cultural backgrounds and eating a lot of, shall we say, interesting food.

Once I left AspenTech, I spent about two years working with another startup, NeuCo, Inc. The work involved applying neural nets to the optimization of coal-fired boiler operation.

This was particularly interesting because of two things… Online optimization is very different from offline simulation and neural net modeling is very different conceptually from the sort of first-principles simulation I had done at AspenTech. I will post some blog entries about my thoughts on this.