Eugene Houdry

Eugene Jules Houdry (born April 18, 1892 in Domont near Paris, † July 18, 1962 in Upper Darby, Pennsylvania ) was a French engineer who obtained US citizenship in 1942. He invented u. a. a process for the splitting of heavy oil fractions, which was further developed for fluid catalytic cracking , a process for the dehydrogenation of butane and the catalytic converter for automobiles .

Life

Houdry was the son of a wealthy steel manufacturer. He studied mechanical engineering at the École nationale supérieure d'Arts et Métiers in Châlons-sur-Marne (Paris), where he graduated in 1911 with a gold medal from the French government. He was the captain of the school's soccer team, which won the French championship that same year.

He first worked in his father's company, which he left shortly before the outbreak of the First World War for military training. He served in the French army as a lieutenant in the tank corps and was seriously injured in Juvincourt in 1917 , for which he was awarded the Croix de guerre and later the title of Knight of the Legion of Honor .

After the war he worked again at Houdry et Fils , his father's company, but later became self-employed when he was developing processes for the catalytic conversion of lignite .

On July 1, 1922, he married Genevieve Quilleret, with whom he had two sons, Jacques and Pierre.

During the Second World War he was a vehement opponent of Philippe Pétain's Vichy regime . On May 3, 1941, his French citizenship was revoked and in January 1942 he became a US citizen, but continued to live in France. His two sons served in the American Army during World War II. He founded France Forever , an organization whose goal it was to get support from the US government for the troops who fought for a free France under Charles de Gaulle .

Houdry was a keen motor sportsman and took part in a car race in a Bugatti .

He died before his wife at the age of 70.

plant

In the early 1920s, he began looking for a catalyst to convert lignite into gasoline. At that time, catalysis was still in its early years and industrial applications were limited to the hydrogenation of vegetable fats to margarine, the conversion of atmospheric nitrogen to ammonia as a raw material for fertilizers and explosives, and the conversion of carbon monoxide to methanol and hydrocarbons. In 1922 he heard about an extraordinary gasoline that was produced by E. A. Prudhomme, a pharmacist in Nice, using a catalytic process. Houdry visited Prudhomme and convinced him to move to Beauchamp near Paris, where Houdry and his business partners financed the construction of a laboratory. During the following years, Houdry worked closely with Prudhomme to develop an economical process for gasoline from lignite.

With the support of the French government, they built a demonstration plant that processed 60 tonnes of brown coal a day into petrol and oil. The plant started up in 1929, but the results were disappointing and not economical. Government support ended and the facility closed in the same year.

In the lignite-to-gasoline process, the lignite was thermally treated to produce viscous oil and bitumen. A catalyst was then added to the oil in order to produce lower-boiling oil fractions. While other researchers had focused on nickel catalysts, Houdry discovered that a mineral called Fuller's earth , an aluminosilicate , was able to convert the brown coal oil into a gasoline-like product. In addition, during his attempts to separate sulfur from the vapors of hydrocarbons, he discovered that the activity of the catalyst could be restored by burning off the accumulated coke. This simple observation represents an important milestone in the history of petroleum processing and laid the foundations for the Houdry process and fluid catalytic cracking.

In 1930, HF Sheets from the Vacuum Oil Company learned of Houdry's promising results in converting gaseous oil into gasoline and invited him to the United States. After a successful demonstration drive, Houdry and his partners relocated the laboratory to Paulsboro, New Jersey.

Houdry and his partners in the Vacuum Oil Company founded the Houdry Process Corporation as a joint venture in 1931 . In the same year Vacuum Oil merged with Standard Oil of New York to form the Socony-Vacuum Oil Company, from which Mobil Oil later emerged. In 1933 a 25 t / d plant was put into operation using the Houdry process, but the oil business weakened due to the economic crisis of the 1930s. Socony-Vacuum allowed Houdry to cooperate with other companies because they could no longer finance his work. In June 1933, Houdry signed a cooperation agreement with the Sun Oil Company and Socony-Vacuum, which made him head of a team of engineers that was to commercialize his fixed bed process. They developed a process that consisted of stripping , cracking and regenerating cycles . Motorized taps switched between containers with catalyst that were in each cycle. The cracking cycle lasted only ten minutes before the catalyst had to be regenerated.

These results prompted Socony-Vacuum and Sun Oil to commercialize the process. In April 1936 Socony-Vacuum in Paulsboro converted an older cracking plant using the thermal process into a semi-commercial plant using the Houdry process. In March 1937, a fully commercial Sun plant went into operation. This 18 t / d facility had such innovations as a salt bath for heat control and motor-driven valves that were controlled by clockworks. Almost 50% of the product was high octane gasoline , compared to 25% in the thermal process.

When Arthur Pew Jr. of Sun Oil presented the details of the successful process at a 1938 meeting of the American Petroleum Institute , amazed the industry. A Fortune magazine article titled " The Invention of Monsieur Houdry " stated that Pew " dropped a bomb ". In 1940 the first large-scale plant for the production of synthetic aluminum oxide / silicon oxide catalysts was put into operation in Paulsboro.

One of the primary advantages of the Houdry process was the production of 100 octane gasoline for aircraft just before the outbreak of World War II. The Houdry plants produced a high-octane gasoline that could be mixed with other, low-quality gasoline to improve the performance of Allied aircraft.

Houdry continued his work with catalysts and was particularly interested in the catalytic role of enzymes in the human body and the cancer-related changes in enzymatic processes. Around 1950, when the results of the first studies of smog in Los Angeles were published, he was concerned about the influence of car exhaust gases on air pollution and founded a special company, the Oxy-Catalyst Company , to develop catalytic converters for gasoline engines - an idea that was way ahead of its time. He developed the first automobile catalytic converter and received a patent for it in 1956. In total, he owned over 100 patents. However, automotive catalytic converters were only used much later, as the lead in the anti- knock agent tetraethyl lead poisoned all catalytic converters.

Honors

• 1948 Potts Medal from the Franklin Institute
• 1948 Perkin Medal of the Society of Chemical Industry (American Section)
• 1962 EV Murphree Award in Industrial and Engineering Chemistry from the American Chemical Society
• 1990 inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame

Patents

• US patent 2,742,437 (catalytic converters for cars) (PDF)

Web links

• Biography in American Chemical Society
• Biography in Chemical Heritage Foundation
• Biography in BookRags
• Biography in Invent Now
• Houdry process in American Chemical Society's National Historic Chemical Landmarks

literature

• William H. Flank, Martin A. Abraham, and Michael A. Matthews: The History of Fluidized Catalytic Cracking . ACS Symposium Series 1000, American Chemical Society, Washington DC, 2009, pp. 189–249 (English)