test. In this test, a wood panel coated with a layer of chalky paint is covered with the test paint, put under a shower for eight hours, then frozen for 16 hours. These 24-hour cycles can be repeated as necessary. PPG also uses this test to find the amount of modifier necessary for proper adhesion. Comparison with oil-based paints shows that the vinyl chloride latex paint is superior to oil-based paint in color stability and resistance to chalking and splitting. In common with other latex paints, the vinyl chloride paint is less sensitive to ultraviolet radiation than oil-based paints.
Esso Chemie to use HTP process Esso Chemie will be the first licensee of the Hoechst high-temperature pyrolysis (HTP) acetylene process (see Brief, page 4 6 ) . The German affiliate of Esso Chemical will build its HTP unit at Esso, A.G.'s refinery at Cologne, West Germany. Capacity will be about 130 million pounds of acetylene and 270 million pounds of ethylene annually. Also, the firm will use Esso Research and Engineering's steam cracker process to produce an additional 500 million pounds per year of ethylene along with propylene, butadiene, and other olefins. Esso says it has not decided yet whether to close down its two small steam crackers at Cologne when the new units come on stream in early 1969. To date, only Hoechst has used its HTP acetylene process. The firm started up an HTP unit at Frankfurt in April 1960. The plant has a combined capacity for acetylene and ethylene of 185 million pounds per year. Hoechst had pressed hard for Marathon Chemische Werke Bayern, a subsidiary of Marathon Oil, to use the HTP process in its complex being built at Burghausen, West Germany, to produce 485 million pounds annually of acetylene and ethylene (for Hoechst's vinyl chloride and ethylene oxide plants at Gendorf and its 50% subsidiary, Wacker-Chemie's acetaldehyde plant at Burghausen). Instead, Marathon elected to use the Wulff route in its $84 million complex. The Hoechst PITP process burns oxygen and a tail gas stream rich in hydrogen to produce the heat necessary to crack light naphtha or methane feeds. The burner is all metal and is water cooled. Feedstock is injected into the hot gases in the combustion zone. Reaction time for cracking is about 0.001 second, after which the cracked products are quenched, and condensed hydrocarbons separated in a refining train. Tail gas can be used
as fuel to the burner or in subsequent chemical synthesis. Hoechst-Uhde International, which licenses the process, claims yields of 50 to 54 weight rU of acetylene plus ethylene from light virgin naphtha and a yield of 40 weight % from methane.
Oregon launches graduate center Dr. Donald L. Benedict, 50, leaves Stanford Research Institute, Menlo Park, Calif., this week to take up the presidency of the Oregon Graduate Center in Portland. His appointment at the new, privately supported educational institution begins officially on Sept. 1. Dr. Benedict, who for the past year has been executive director of SRI's Physical and Industrial Sciences group, has a demanding, if stimulating, task ahead of him to get the center rolling. He starts out with a $2 million budget that Portland's Tektronix Foundation has provided, and a 10,000-sq.-ft. building that formerly housed a Martin Marietta metallurgical research group. His first order of business will be to seek out high-caliber scientists who will form the nucleus of his teaching staff, and to start laying plans for equipping the laboratories in the new center. As the name implies, the Oregon Graduate Center will confine itself to graduate training and research. The center will grant degrees at the master's and doctor's level in the physical sciences, chiefly chemistry, physics, electronic engineering, and related mathematics. The idea of the graduate center evolved out of a study that Oregon's Governor Mark Hatfield initiated six years ago. It is part of a broader effort aimed at increasing the level of technological research that Gov. Hatfield hopes will attract more industry to the Portland area. Presidents of several of the state's schools and leaders of local industry recommended the center. Physicist Benedict aims at a professor-to-graduate-student ratio of about 1:5. Pie foresees 50 Ph.D. degrees granted annually during the early life of the center. Within the next eight years or so, he expects the student population to reach 250. At that level, there will be a need for about 50 full-time professors and some 200 supporting staff. Dr. Benedict recognizes the importance of ensuring that the new graduate center will supplement and fit into the pattern of advanced degree training in the state. For example, Oregon's two major universities that offer graduate science programs—University of Oregon at Eugene and Ore-
gon State University at Corvallis—are beyond commuting distance from Portland, he points out. He also notes that the center will provide working space for professional staffs of neighboring institutions who want to study there on a part-time basis. Dr. Richard Kerr, associate professor of applied science at Portland State University, for example, has already been assigned space at the center, where he has started research work on the propagation of laser beams in the atmosphere. His work is being supported by a Tektronix Foundation grant. ''Graduate institutions are a trend of
Dr. Donald L. Benedict $2 million and 10,000 sq. ft.
the times," Dr. Benedict notes. He cites Rockefeller University in New York City, which is offering graduate science training, and the Graduate Research Center of the Southwest in Dallas, Tex. The Dallas center, founded in 1961, provides working space for graduate students but degrees are granted by the universities the graduates are enrolled in. In many ways Dr. Benedict hopes to pattern the Oregon center after the successful Technische Hochschule system in Germany. During his one and a half years in Zurich, where he managed SRI's office, he toured most of those and similar institutions and has since maintained close contact with the people there. AUG.
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