Process Engineering Consultant for Precious Metals Recovery and Hazardous Chemicals Processing

Technical Consultant #1712

Process Engineering Manager: Inventor of new, patented processes for converting hazardous chemicals to either salable or benign species.
Managed and installed over 200 capital projects in proprietary flavor and fragrance, and precious metal industries.
Chemical reactor design, extraction, distillation, scrubbers, maintenance management, quality control and security.
TSCA design for hazardous locations, Class I, Division flammable systems.
Separations design for organic and inorganic chemicals.
Program national labs Labview data acquisition system.
Designed and installed instruments and process systems for small scale experimentation.
Clean Air Act, New source review consulting.
Permitting meeting California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) standards.
Solar thermal panel design and process consulting.

Undisclosed Company, President, 1999 - Present

Reactive Separations Technology Development and Licensing

Developed new scrubbing technology for ozone depleting alkyl halides; license technology to fumigators and exporters for ozone layer protection.
Scrubbing technology judged BACT (Best Available Control Technology) for State of California for destroying methyl bromide (3 patents and 2 pending ).
Federal contractor, 5 SBIR Awards, U.S. Dept of Energy for removing anions from wastewater.
Chemical synthesis development for carbon fibers.
Designed and built custom 3,000 sq. ft. lab space for process development.

Johnson Matthey, Inc., West Deptford, NJ, Process Engineering Manager, 1991 - 1998

Managed capital programs resulting in 50% ROI in 5 years.
Production expansion for extraction, filtration, high temperature ovens and rhodium octanoate process overhaul.

Capital Project Manager

Overseeing 7 engineers, 3 supervisors and 35 maintenance.
Introduced first principals approach to evaluating processes and projects.
Automated precious metal refinery, including: Reactor design, crystallizers, precious metal filtrations, corrosion design, installed continuous processes for gold removal and precious metal recovery.
De-bottlenecked effluent plant via ammonia removal.
Eliminated most of historical precious metal loss of $1.5 million per year.
Installed first non-PGM plant material balance.
Conceived and installed automatic titrators for absolute pH control of scrubbers.
Negotiated and implemented comprehensive contractor policy and overtime system in conjunction with union representatives.

Hercules Inc., 1980 - 1991

Technical Superintendent, Middletown, NY

Scale up of fermentation processes to make natural butyric acid and high pressure esterifications to produce ethyl butyrate.
Designed and started up ultra filtration and reverse osmosis operations for 20,000 gallon continuous fermenter.
Developed process safety review and HAZOP.
Negotiated and Implemented toll processing contracts and technology transfer packages to tollers for continuous liquid-liquid extraction of flavor compounds.

Quality Control Director

Conceived and installed statistical analysis of customer complaints.
Head of quality improvement team charged with root cause problem solving. Resulted in 45% fewer customer complaints.
Set manufacturing protocols and was the "receiver" of all new research and development processes for implementation into the chemical plant.
Orange oil distillations, supercritical vanilla extraction, spray drying, high pressure autoclave esterifications.
Managed installation of all capital projects.

Chemical Engineer, Wilmington, DE

Pilot plant process research on continuous "bulk" polypropylene pilot plant.
Solved catalyst flow and iso-kinetic polymer transfer problems.
Supervised 2 engineers and 12 operators for a 24 hours, seven days a week operation.

Publications and Patents