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ALUM FUNDS MAJOR CBE EQUIPMENT GIFTS
 

While many contributors to academic programs focus on endowing chairs and scholarships, comparatively few offer the kind of unrestricted gifts that can be used for equally vital capital expenditures such as lab equipment. So when Bernard Breen (PhD’64), an alumnus of the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, made a major gift to his alma mater a few years back, his only request was that the funds should support research in the energy sector—after all, that’s where he made the money in the first place.

“After Tom Wheelock and I began our project on coal gasification,” says CBE Associate Professor Brent Shanks, “[former department chair] Chuck Glatz came to us and asked if we would put in a proposal to Ben about how we would spend some of that money.”

That was music to Shanks’ ears, and earlier this month, together with Glatz and CBE Chair James C. Hill, he welcomed Breen and members of his family to a demonstration of the department’s new Micromeritics ASAP 2020 surface area and porosimetry analyzer. According to Shanks, the $52,000 device will permit CBE researchers to analyze and characterize surface area and porosity in order to better achieve a balance between these two critical aspects of catalysts.

Introducing discrete amounts of nitrogen to catalysts, Shanks says, the ASAP 2020 can measure changes in pressure after equilibration, revealing precisely how much nitrogen is adsorbed and, in the process, the catalyst’s surface area. And by loading the sample with increasing amounts of nitrogen, thus filling the surface’s pores, investigators can characterize porosity by backing off pressure and monitoring the release of the adsorbed nitrogen.

Fully automated with the capacity to run two samples simultaneously, the ASAP 2020 represents a major upgrade in capability over equipment the department had been using courtesy of Ames Laboratory. Certainly, it’s light years beyond the tools Shanks cut his teeth on as an undergraduate at Iowa State in the 1980s.

“My first job when I was an undergraduate in this department,” Shanks recalls, “was using a BET apparatus and it was very labor intensive—you had to be there to run the sample, and it would take several hours to do that.”

While it’s safe to assume such work was no simpler 20 years earlier, Bernard Breen’s career took a somewhat different direction after leaving Iowa State in 1964. In 1970 he founded an engineering firm that rapidly grew from two to more than two hundred employees before being acquired in 1978.

Breen, who had minored in electrical engineering during his doctoral program, then made his mark as a consultant for the utility industry. In 1981 he formed his current company, Energy Systems Associates of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Since founding ESA, he and his associates have obtained nearly three dozen patents for technologies for combustion, pollution, and general utility boiler problems that have been credited with reducing nitric oxide emissions by more than two-thirds in southern California utility plants and hundreds of other coal-burning boilers across the U.S.