Eugene Houdry

Eugene Houdry (1892-1962) was a French mechanical engineer who invented catalytic cracking of petroleum feed stocks. He originally focused on using lignite (brown coal) as a feedstock, but switched to using heavy liquid tars. The first Houdry unit was built at Sun Oil's Marcus Hook, PA oil refinery in 1937. Many more units were built by the 1940s and were instrumental for US wartime aviation gasoline production.

The process was further developed by two MIT engineers, Warren K. Lewis and Edwin R. Gilliland, under contract to Standard Oil of New Jersey, now ExxonMobil. They developed the process into fluid catalytic cracking, which solved the problem of having to shut down the process to burn the coke off the catalyst by using a continuously circulating fluidized catalyst made of a fine zeolite powder . This process is still in widespread use, especially in the US where gasoline is in high demand.

Houdry later became interested in automotive catalysts, and the catalytic converter was one of approximately 100 patents that he received. but nothing came of it until the 1970s because the tetraethyl lead that was still in use in the 1950s and 1960s poisoned the catalyst.

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