Ind. Eng. Chem. Res. 1997, 36, 2883
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What Did Gilbert Do and How Did He Do It? Gilbert Froment came out of the Hougen & Watson tradition at the University of Wisconsin to set new standards of excellence in Catalytic Kinetics and Chemical Reaction Engineering. In his Laboratorium voor Petrochemische Techniek he combined experiment and theory in most productive and insightful ways. His intellectual attributes, boundless energy, dynamic personality, and openness to new tools, such as statistics and computers, led him to organize the frontierexpanding NATO Advanced Study Institute on “Analysis of Fluid-Solid Catalytic Systems” in 1974. In 1970 he served on the organizing committee for the first of the discipline-defining International Symposia on Chemical Reaction Engineering (following some years of similar European symposia) which continue to this day. Gilbert’s 1979 textbook, with Ken Bischoff, remains today the ultimate (both deep and comprehensive) codification of classical Chemical Reaction Engineering. But he was not satisfied. As in many disciplines, breakthroughs come with massive simplification. Within the context of hydrocarbon processing Gilbert recognized that there are an endless variety of chemical species but only a small number of bond types. So he set out to quantify bond rather than molecular reactions, thus achieving enormous conceptual simplification and, for systems with many reacting species, computational efficiency. That’s some of what Gilbert Froment did. How did he do it? Joyfully!
Robert L. Kabel Department of Chemical Engineering The Pennsylvania State University 158 Fenske Laboratory University Park, Pennsylvania 16802-4400 tel. 814-865-2574 fax 814-865-7846 IE9602163
S0888-5885(96)00216-3 CCC: $14.00
© 1997 American Chemical Society
