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Archie E. Hamielec An Informal Minibiography Archie Hamielec was awarded BASc, MASc, and Ph.D. degrees in Chemical Engineering at the University of Toronto during the period 1957-1961. His Ph.D. specialization was in the field of fluid mechanics, heat and mass transfer of Newtonian fluids. After graduation, he worked for Canadian Industries Limited (C-IL) as Research Engineer, leaving in 1963 to take up a position as Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. For the first 10 years Professor Hamielec’s academic research was in three quite diverse areas. The first area involved extensive collaboration with Professor Hans Pruppacher, Department of Meteorology, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA, in the area of modeling of nucleation and growth of raindrops. Professor Pruppacher provided expertise in cloud physics and associated experimentation, while Hamielec developed mathematical models to describe many aspects of raindrop growth by diffusion, forced and natural convection, and collision. S0888-5885(97)00068-7 CCC: $14.00
The second area involved extensive collaboration with Professors W. K. Lu and A. McLean, Department of Metallurgy and Materials Science, McMaster University, in the area of steelmaking. Hamielec provided expertise in transport phenomena. One of the major accomplishments of this research was the development of a novel technique for the measurement of surface tension of molten metals (e.g., molten iron at 1500 °C). A particle of metal was levitated and melted to a controlled temperature in a magnetic field. The molten droplet could then be purified by flowing various gaseous mixtures by it. Once purified, the droplet shape was perturbed by varying the gas flow and videos were taken to measure the frequency of oscillation. An equation after Rayleigh could then be used to estimate the surface tension given the droplet weight and natural frequency of oscillation. The third research area did not involve collaboration initially with other academics. This may have been © 1997 American Chemical Society
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because there was no academic at McMaster University doing polymer research in 1963. Hamielec became aware of the potential commerical importance of polymers while working at C-I-L (1961-1963) and decided to do research in this promising area as well. He was one of the first academics in the world to obtain a Waters gel permeation chromatograph in 1964 for molecular weight distribution measurement of polymer samples synthesized by him. After a few years at McMaster, he realized that polymer science and engineering research was in its infancy, with great intellectual challenges awaiting. The rapid growth of the polymer industry and associated funding for academic research did not go unnoticed. Research on raindrop phenomena and steelmaking was soon abandoned in favor of a concentrated effort on the study of polymer manufacturing processes. This particular research area was coined “polymer reaction engineering”, to emphasize chemical reactions involving polymers (e.g., polymer synthesis and polymer modification with chemical reactions) and to differentiate it from polymer processing, which involves the physics of fluids but little chemistry. Hamielec is now considered one of the founding fathers of polymer reaction engineering, a field of research that has been accepted by the research community, with international conferences held on a regular basis in Europe and the U.S.A. and an international journal, Polymer Reaction Engineering, of very high quality which has been operative for several years to satisfy the needs of an ever-growing number of researchers in this field. Hamielec’s contributions to this field as an educator and a researcher are outstanding. He has supervised over 35 Ph.D. candidates, and of these about one-third are professors of chemical engineering and pharmacy in Japan, Europe, U.S.A., and Canada. His own research contributions are substantial, with over 250 publications on a wide range of topics from the development of the principles of the operation of sizeexclusion chromatography to the introduction of the pseudo-kinetic rate constant method for the kinetics of synthesis of copolymers by chain-growth polymerization. Professor Hamielec was Chairman of the Department of Chemical Engineering at McMaster from 1976 to 1980 and in 1982 became the Founding Director of the McMaster Institute for Polymer Production Technology (MIPPT), a position he still holds today. His present
research interests involve polymer production technology with special emphasis on polymer reactor modeling and polymer particle characterization. Hamielec has received several awards in recognition of his research accomplishments. These include the following: (i) 1974: ERCO Award of the Canadian Society of Chemical Engineering (CSChE) for distinguished contributions to chemical engineering by someone under the age of 40. (ii) 1978: Chemical Institute of Canada (CIC) Protective Coatings Award in recognition of contributions to the fundamentals of emulsion polymerization. (iii) 1987: CIC Dunlop Award to recognize research contributions in polymer science and engineering. (iv) 1986: Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) Chair in Polymer Technology, a chair held by him until his early retirement in 1993. (v) 1984: elected Fellow of the CIC. (vi) 1987: elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. (vii) 1994: R.S. Jane Memorial Lecture Award, the premier award of the CSChE for outstanding lifetime contributions to chemical engineering. Professor Hamielec has had major interactions with the polymer industry for over 25 years worldwide through consulting and via industrial membership in MIPPT. He invented a process for the manufacture of low molecular weight specialty copolymers (Hamielec et al. U.S. Patent 4414370, Nov 8, 1983; process for continuous bulk copolymerization of vinyl monomers). This process has been profitably used worldwide by S.C. Johnson & Son, Racine, WI, for the last 10 years. Concerning his family life, Mae and Archie Hamielec, who have been happily married for 41 years, have a total of five grandchildren from their three daughters: Cindy, a medical doctor and part-time faculty member at McMaster University; Lisa, a chemical engineer; and Tia, a chemist. Alexander Penlidis, F.C.I.C. Department of Chemical Engineering University of Waterloo Waterloo, Ontario N2L 3G1 Canada IE970068W
