Faculty Highlight

I am completing my 14th year as a faculty member in Chemical Engineering at BYU. Its been great to work with such wonderful students and colleagues in such a great environment. IÕve been the AIChE student chapter advisor for 13 years now and we received our tenth Outstanding Chapter Award from national AIChE last November. Next week IÕll be taking 7 students to the regional AIChE conference in Tempe, Arizona. WeÕve had some great experiences and created some great memories taking students to regional and national conferences over the years. Currently I am teaching the Air Pollution Control class for my 6th time and I am really enjoying it. Since that is my only teaching assignment this semester, I have time to update, fine-tune and do some things that I havenÕt had time to do before. Air Pollution is a very dynamic field which applies many of the fundamentals of chemical engineering such as separations, kinetics, mass and energy balances, etc. to understanding the production, effects, and control of particulates, CO, NOx, VOCÕs, and SOx. Last semester was probably the busiest semester, but also one of the most productive, in my 14 years here. I taught both graduate kinetics/catalysis (ChE 535) and material and energy balances (ChE 273). I also took and prepared for major trips to Miami Beach (AIChE meeting), Spain (IntÕl Conf. on Coal Science), and California (taught short course at Chevron Research). In addition, if I go back to August, two of my graduate students finished their degrees: Richard Cope completed his Ph.D. in August and Kent McDonald completed his M.S. in December. Add the normal advising and research duties- I was working with 5 graduate and 4 undergraduate students on research projects - and you can see that I didn't have much free time, but it was really nice to see some goals accomplished.

My research efforts are in the areas of char combustion kinetics, NOx reduction catalysis, and FTIR spectroscopy. Mostly through the efforts of Walter Reade, we have developed a char oxidation model (dubbed RHCOM) which does an excellent job of predicting high temperature char oxidation behavior. We also do experimental kinetic measurements of the reactions of char with oxygen and with NO and have shown that the CaO inherent in the mineral matter of the char acts as a catalyst in both of these reactions. We also continue to do work in developing FTIR spectroscopy as a tool to study the mechanisms of reactions occurring on solid surfaces.

John N. Harb

I was pretty proud of myself for managing to avoid making a contribution to the previous newsletter. Well, it caught up with me and I suppose that this spotlight represents a sort of repentance. On the other hand, I don't know that it will do any good since I have certainly not experienced a "change of heart".

The beginning of this month marked the completion of my 8th year in the department. However, I am still the youngest member of the faculty (which doesn't say much for everyone else). For those of you who may be interested, my wife, Ruth, and I have four children (including one teenager), a large dog, two cats (we may be down to one if the kitten doesn't shape up), and a bird. I am also the proud owner of a 1976 Toyota Corolla, if that is possible. I currently lead all challengers in the messy office category, although I did actually read some mail the other day. By the way, I do respond to e-mail and would enjoy hearing from any of you (jharb@caedm.byu.edu).

I have thoroughly enjoyed working at Brigham Young University. We have a wonderful department and are striving to truly serve our students and to help them learn. My latest adventure toward this objective has been the joint development, with Ken Solen, of a new freshman course and text. In this freshman class, students are led step-by-step through an engineering design problem, and introduced to many of the important aspects of chemical engineering along the way. In addition, students perform meaningful engineering calculations as part of the class, and are given the opportunity to make engineering decisions. For example, they learn how to perform material balances, calculate the work required for a pump, design a chemical reactor, and size a heat exchanger. They are also introduced to engineering economics, computer tools, and principles of teamwork. The class provides them with an overview of the chemical engineering discipline which serves as a foundation for future course work and helps them to make an informed choice of career. Last, but not least, the class is loads of fun to teach!

I also have a busy graduate program. I hope to graduate two doctoral students and one M.S. student this year. Most of my work over the past few years has been related to coal combustion where we have run pilot-scale tests, developed state-of-the-art analytical techniques (on the scanning electron microscope), and performed numerical simulations of complex physical systems. I am also beginning to do some battery-related research and anticipate a sabbatical leave next year to get that work off the ground.
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