(583a) North American Mixing Forum Award for Excellence Lecture: Innovation: Keep It Simple and Make It Happen (Invited Talk)

Product and process technology innovations are vital to the sustainability of global chemical, petrochemical, agriculture, food, pharmaceutical, and personal care industries. While sharing some innovative solutions from my professional career, I hope to emphasize the two guiding principles that form the subtitle to my comments. They are “keep it simple” and “make it happen.” Beyond raw innovation, the best solutions focus on a limited number of executable concepts that are easily understood and implemented. Complex approaches too often overshadow the obvious, and spawn multifaceted actions of impressive complexity, but of little value because they don’t ultimately solve the problem.

This lecture highlights a few mixing process inventions of the presenter and his colleagues at The Dow Chemical Company that provided simple solutions to unmet needs in R&D and manufacturing, while often establishing a “most effective technology.” Such solutions also commonly produce the desired product at the lowest possible cost. Presentation examples include implementations of the: (a) KT-3 tickler impeller to minimize solids heels in draining slurry reactors, (b) KS-8 slinger to prevent migration of fine solids into the overhead condensers of boiling reactors, (c) KBB bubble breaker to minimize foam formation, and avoid ratholing while removing light solids from storage vessels, (d) KDM, a simple low-cost impeller to mix high viscosity materials in high-throughput vials and (e) KHX, a sequentially pulsating-flow shell-and-tube heat exchanger to improve heat transfer and mitigate solids deposition in the inlet head.