Elliot Wolf Stokes

Full transcript

Everyone, welcome to the second episode of Beyond the Blueprint. Today we're here with Mr. Wolf, and he'll be talking a little about chemical engineering. So the first question we have is, what inspired you to pursue a career in chemical engineering, and how did you find your niche in process safety?

All right. Thank you for that question, Joshua. I have to admit, full disclosure, chemistry in high school wasn't my favorite subject. So it's a little bit unusual that I went into chemical engineering, but I was good at the time at math and science.

And I was a problem solver. And in engineering, that's what we do. We solve problems. When I was a freshman in college, I kind of went through a bit of a process of elimination where I was considering different majors like mechanical engineering, civil engineering electrical engineering and uh after about a year what i discovered was that um chemical engineering is interesting because it involves how molecules and the architecture of molecules influences uh the behavior of different materials that you know we have every day, like materials that are breathable or waterproof or bulletproof, right?

So that really kind of fascinated me. And I started to do research under a professor in my sophomore year and learned a lot about just material science. And that's what I think really kind of cemented my decision to go into chemical engineering. And then years later, process safety is a specific domain within chemical engineering.

It's very different than personal safety, like slips, trips, and falls. Personal safety often involves just a single individual. What's different about the process safety domain is that it does require an understanding of thermodynamics, kinetics, the transport flow properties of materials, so that those hazards can be managed appropriately to prevent catastrophic releases or accidents that could impact multiple people, the environment or businesses. So if you think about Chernobyl or the Bhopal India disaster that happened in 1984, those are the those are really the types of risks that a chemical engineer that's in process safety would protect companies against.

Thank you. for the second question how did your education sorry what sorry what then you can do it that's the second question okay yeah okay how did your education prepare you for your current role at honeywell were there specific courses or experiences that shaped your focus on safety management Yeah, another really good question. So, yeah, I completed my bachelor's degree in chemical engineering. As I was working, I also had aspirations to do more research and development.

So I went and pursued a master's degree and having worked with commercial groups for a business and developing new products that went out to clients. At the time, I was working for a company that made protective foam and packaging. And so Hula Packer, just as an example, was one one of the customers. And as I worked more with the business and commercial people, I decided that it was a good idea for me to pursue an MBA, a master's in business administration.

And because as an engineer, math and science skills are pretty strong. What I got really interested in that I think benefited me benefits me now, especially with my role with Honeywell, is really understanding how organizations work. work. So organizational leadership, organizational psychology, really understanding how to manage a business to create a product and do that in a way that's sustainable and you're maintaining or creating processes that are environmentally friendly.

So a lot of safety or process safety is about developing a shared vision and values amongst a group of people in an organization to lead them to be able to solve complex problems. And again, I'll kind of keep going back to that as engineers, we were problem solvers. So I think those were the courses and experiences that really set me up for success in my current role as the director of process safety for Honeywell. So for our next question, I guess it's specifically about something you did at your job.

So can you walk me through a time when you had to identify and mitigate a major chemical process hazard? Yeah, this is a great question. So engineers and process safety engineers often talk about what we call the day process safety hit home. And for some people, that may have involved an accident or an incident or a significant release that either impacted them or maybe it hurt a co-worker.

And that's that changed their life going forward. For me, the day that process safety for me hit home where I was identifying and mitigating a major chemical hazard involved a material that was potentially explosive. And around that time, the company that I had worked for, my mentor for a number of years had just retired. And so when he retired, I was the lead technical authority or expert that was in charge.

So everybody was coming to me for advice on how are we going to manage this particular change for a very hazardous and potentially explosive material. So that moment that very real moment the gravity kind of hit me where you realize that other people lives are in your hands with with the decision that you make And so there are specific processes that we have to follow anytime we make a change to a chemical facility to ensure that we do it in a safe way, right? So it's got to be reviewed by a team of experts. You have to do a risk assessment and really justify the rationale for making that change.

And this particular material 40 or 50 years prior to that, the company had a significant explosion that fatally injured an employee at one of their facilities. And that was the first and only time that they had a fatality. So from that point forward, they developed safety management systems and had a perfect record. And the images of that accident really had a profound effect on me realizing the the energies involved with different chemicals.

And so in a way, it kind of instilled, I call it a bit of a fear, but it's really a respect for the chemicals that we're dealing with and managing. Thank you for that. Yeah, thank you. So how do you apply chemical engineering principles like thermodynamics or reaction kinetics in your current work related to the safety and sustainability?

of the body? Yeah, so I think thermodynamics and kinetics have always kind of been a foundational kind of basic fundamental science that you need to take into consideration anytime that you're either developing a product or a process or managing safety risk. Earlier on in my career, before I got into safety where I would develop new products. I had mentioned I worked for a company that developed foam packaging.

And if you ever looked inside of a bicycle helmet and you see the foam structure or if you bought a big screen television and you open up the box and you take the foam out in the television, that foam is engineered in a very specific way to be able to withstand an impact. Right. If somebody, you know, drops the TV on the way that it's being shipped to your house or if somebody is wearing a bicycle helmet and they have an accident and, you know, unfortunately hit their head off the street there, it's engineered in a way to absorb that energy and protect whatever it is inside of the phone, whether it's a TV or, you know, someone's someone's skull. Right.

So early on in my career, I was I was involved in the development of new foam applications where the the goal was to create something and modify the molecular architecture to be able to provide the same level of protection, but with less foam. and being able to do it with less foam made it more environmentally friendly, right? So fewer shipments or less waste of packaging after it would arrive at the customer's destination. Most foam packaging is discarded or thrown into the trash.

There are there are some applications where maybe it's recycled. But our goal was to come up with something that had a lower environmental footprint. Let's see. For our next question, I'm going to be asking, what are some common misconceptions people have about chemical engineering careers?

Yeah, this is a this is a good one. And so I think an undergrad when you're in college, chemical engineering, at least when I was in college, was probably the most feared engineering degree of all of them just because of the high level of difficulty. So, you know, one misconception is that we didn't really have much of much of a life. We just were studying all the time or in the library.

Now, I spent a lot of time in the library, but I was able to balance that with with a life outside of school. Maybe another misconception is that chemical engineers work in laboratories and work with chemicals. That's also not necessarily true. There are many different career paths that chemical engineers can go on to.

And then another one is we walk around with periodic tables in our back pocket. That's not true. But I one of my professors in my sophomore year, he made the comment in one of our classes that there's a lot of chemical engineers on Wall Street doing financial modeling. And at the time, I didn't quite understand that.

But after I completed my degree, I knew why he he had that observation. And which was true is because as chemical engineers, you learn a problem solving skill set to be able to do very sophisticated modeling. And that the math of being able to do that modeling easily translates from chemicals to financial modeling to operations modeling. There's a lot of real world applications for that skill set.

So I think the misconception is that if you get a chemical engineering degree, you're always going to work with chemicals. But that's actually that's probably, you know, maybe maybe about half true. I think for the first one you're talking about with the hard degree, I've seen videos and everyone's always saying that, like, someone will come and interview someone and ask, like, what's the hardest engineering major? And they always say chemical engineering or electrical.

Yeah, it's difficult. But, you know, what I find is when you you know, when you're passionate about something and you're interested and you're curious about it and, you know, that's what you want to pursue. it it makes it easier there were there were very few uh engineers that would transfer out of say mechanical or civil or electrical and go into chemical but there were many chemical engineers that would transfer out and go to mechanical civil electrical or industrial engineering Since you an expert at safety and risk management what software tools or simulation platforms do you commonly use in your safety and risk analysis work? Yeah, one of one of the the tools or softwares, I guess you could call it that has has been really an important kind of principle foundational type method, I would say that I've used quite a bit in my career is Monte Carlo simulation.

So you've probably taken maybe you've taken a probability course or a statistics course in high school. And the Monte Carlo method, it actually it was invented back in the 1940s while researchers were working at Los Alamos National Laboratories on the atomic bomb. And the reason why they call it the Monte Carlo method is because one of the researchers, I guess his uncle spent a lot of time at the casino in in Monaco, Monte Carlo. And so the method itself is a lot about probabilities and probability distribution and statistics.

So they named it after his uncle, his uncle's gambling habit. But it has really brought out applicability. I was first introduced to it in graduate school when I was pursuing my master's degree in chemical engineering. And it was a way to mathematically represent the behavior of molecules.

So instead of just using first principle type formulas to calculate, say, what would the pressure or temperature be of a given molecule at a certain, you know, at certain conditions? You were able to simulate that. And the reason why simulation is important when you get a lot of complex complexity within the interactions or the variables that are involved, trying to represent the reality with the model. It's a it's a very useful technique.

And so I was able to translate that from chemical engineering and modeling molecules to modeling risk in chemical facilities to understand, OK, what's the likelihood or the severity of a particular incident if it were to happen? And what are the prevention or mitigation measures that we need to put in place to reduce the risk as low as possible? It turns out that Monte Carlo simulation is also used for financial modeling. So that's that's the you know, the other the other skill set there that is very useful on Wall Street.

So it's very widespread. So since it is a model and with the advancement of AI today, has it made any impact on the improvement of the model? Yeah, certainly AI and the ability to train a model if you have data to be able to be more predictive in its ability to anticipate whether certain events will happen. So I agree that the advent of artificial intelligence, I think, has taken that type of analysis and method to greater lengths and utility in order to be able to predict situations, whether it's in a chemical facility or if it involves safety or if it involves financial risk.

So you could say like it predicts better based on instant situations that happen. That's a very complex subject. Whenever you begin to try to understand when a certain event will happen, it's hard to predict when it'll happen. However, you can develop models that will tell you how vulnerable you are to a certain risk happening within a given time frame.

So I don't think we've cracked the code to being able to anticipate that it's going to happen on this day at this time. But I think the models have improved in such a way where the resolution in that time frame of when it could happen is much better. Thank you. Next question I'm going to ask, can you explain how process safety integrates with the broader goals of sustainability and energy efficiency in chemical plants?

Yeah, they're, I would say, very aligned. You know, I work for a company, Honeywell, that develops and commercializes advanced materials that enhance the eco efficiency while also reducing environmental impact. The primary focus of the business that I'm involved in is to develop next generation solutions such as low global warming potential refrigerants. other types of high strength fibers or ballistic resistant fibers, performance chemicals, chemicals that go into semiconductors and specialty additives.

In all of those, you know, we are looking for ways to reduce our environmental footprint, the amount of emissions that are released to the environment. So, you know, if you look at the overall operational sustainability of a facility, those are things that as chemical engineers and as process safety professionals, when we work collectively as a business, we're all working towards that same mission and goal to produce materials in a way that's not just cost efficient, but efficient in terms of its impact on the environment. Okay Thank you So my question is how has the role of chemical engineers changed with the rise of green energy and sustainability efforts So green energy and chemical engineers, I would say there's a lot of emerging science in that in that space with respect to new products and new developments. For one example is just the hydrogen economy.

Right. And how do we use hydrogen in a way versus more traditional fossil fuels? So that that's that's one area. Wind is another.

Solar is another. I mentioned the company that I work for, Honeywell. We produce materials that go into semiconductors. So these types of specialty additives or specialty materials that require them to be able to operate in conditions that are very adverse, either very corrosive or high temperature or high pressure conditions.

New battery technology is also another emerging area so that we're using electricity more so in our daily lives, whether it's in transportation or just in a lot of our household goods so that they're more eco-friendly. So I think these are all ways that chemical engineers in particular, our skill set and ability to solve those types of complex problems can contribute to the rise of green energy and a more sustainable future for our planet. so what is one project um you're especially proud of that has made a meaningful impact on society or in environmental impact yeah so about 20 years ago i was working for uh the dupont company and back in that time frame You may have heard of PFAS, which are perfluorinated materials that are quite common to be used in things like Teflon or water resistant applications. And so back in the early 2000s, there was an effort because these perfluorinated surfactants were environmentally persistent.

So they didn't biodegrade very well. And another way to characterize them is that they were bioaccumulative. And so we had produced a product that used PFAS and I was the engineer responsible for the manufacturing process. And what wasn't known at the time is that there were other alternatives, surfactants, or they're basically soaps that could be used in the process that were non-PFAS materials and which would environmentally degrade.

so they weren't persistent, they wouldn't accumulate in the environment. And so as a chemical engineer, I was the lead on the project on the manufacturing side to really take this new technology from research and development and implement it in our manufacturing process. So that was a really significant change for the company very early on when this science was emerging. And so the end result is that we were able to replace all of the products there with this new surfactant that was, you know, essentially very similar to a dish detergent.

Right. And we use this dish detergent or soaps to wash clothes all the time. So to be able to replace a PFAS surfactant with something that is much more of a household common soap was quite a breakthrough and discovery. And when I look back on it, it was definitely a highlight in my career, not just because of the impact on the business, but the impact that it had on the environment and sustainability.

That's very impressive. Thank you. So our final question is, what advice would you give to a high school student interested in chemical engineering, especially one that wants to make a global impact in safety or sustainability? Yeah, thank you for that question.

You know, like we've talked today about, we've had an opportunity, I've really enjoyed this conversation about chemical engineering and process safety. And, you know, talked about some of the misconceptions, talked about the opportunities there are in chemical engineering. So my message and my advice would be to, you know, be open to the possibilities that a degree in chemical engineering can offer. So many of my friends who are chemical engineers, they go on to successful careers in health care, marketing, finance, risk management.

There's really a very broad career trajectory that you could go on because it's a very versatile degree. So maybe just because chemistry may not be your favorite subject, if you were like me in high school, don't rule it out. I guess I'm a good example of that. And it took me a few years to realize what I was really passionate about.

And then when I learned that chemical engineering was a pathway for me to get there, that's what, you know, for me, cemented my decision to pursue it. And now, You know, I'm fortunate enough to lead an organization that's a Fortune 500 company with Honeywell and really enjoying it and having the time of my life.