William Luyben to receive national award from AIChE

In his 36-year academic career at Lehigh, William Luyben, professor of chemical engineering, has gained international respect for his work in the control and design of chemical processes, especially in practical distillation control systems.

Luyben has authored or co-authored eight textbooks and more than 180 journal articles, most of which contain practical solutions to engineering problems. The impact of his work is perhaps best measured by the fact that his publications have been cited more than 1,700 times by other researchers.

In 1985, Luyben played a key role in founding Lehigh's Chemical Process Modeling and Control Research Center (PMC) as an Industry-University Cooperative Research Center. The center, which Luyben now co-directs, is recognized internationally for its research, for its collaboration with industry, and for the quality of the graduate students it has helped to educate.

As an educator, Luyben has sought to give students hands-on opportunities to learn for themselves the practical aspects of process control. He has supervised the dissertations of 31 Ph.D. students and 22 master's-degree students, and he has been instrumental in setting up state-of-the-art simulation labs for chemical engineering undergraduates.

Recently, Luyben was chosen to receive two of the highest honors in his field. Later this year, a special issue of the journal Industrial and Engineering Chemistry will be devoted to Luyben's career and to his contributions to the practice of process control and design. The issue will recognize Luyben's 70th birthday, which he celebrates in October, and will include contributed papers focusing on areas of process control practice related to Luyben's work.

In November, Luyben will receive the prestigious Computing Practice Award of the Computing and Systems Technology (CAST) division of the American Institute for Chemical Engineers (AIChE).

The award, which is given to an individual from industry or academia who has made "outstanding contributions in the practice or application of computing and systems technology to chemical engineering," will be presented at AIChE's annual meeting in November in San Francisco.

Luyben is being commended for "pioneering the practice of process control and the integration of process control and design, with particular emphasis on practical distillation control systems, through outstanding journal and book publications and through graduate and undergraduate education."

Luyben was nominated for the CAST award by Anthony McHugh, chair of chemical engineering. The nomination was put together by Mayuresh Kothare, associate professor of chemical engineering and co-director of the PMC.

"Bill Luyben is the quintessential academician who has furthered the practice of process control and design with seminal fundamental research," Kothare wrote in the nomination. "He remains the clear leader in championing the notion that process control research and education must be strongly tied with industrial practice.

"Bill's early research on distillation control is accepted as the standard starting point for defining the control problem for distillation columns," Kothare said. "He has supervised graduate students on practical aspects of azeotropic distillation control system, reactive distillation control and control of distillation systems combined with reactors and incorporating recycle streams."

Luyben was one of the first academics, Kothare wrote, "to recognize the impact of recycle streams on the controllability of plant-wide systems. He provided useful guidelines to address this practical problem in his book on plant-wide control."

Luyben joined the Lehigh faculty in 1967. Previously, he had worked for Exxon as a process engineer and for DuPont as a control engineer. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Delaware.

At Lehigh, says Kothare, Luyben's research has been marked by a "strong emphasis on practical aspects of process control strategies for real engineering systems...His many papers have been used for distillation control throughout industry from the time of their original publication. Consistently, throughout his academic career, his papers have been eminently practical, clearly presented and widely influential."

In 1996-97, Luyben played a key role in setting up, and securing National Science Foundation funding for the chemical engineering department's Computer-Aided Design Lab, where Lehigh's undergraduate chemical engineering majors simulate and study processes in real-life chemical plants before the plants are actually constructed. The lab has become an integral part of a two-semester senior course in process and plant design.

Among the eight books that Luyben has co-authored are two that he co-wrote with his son, Michael Luyben, who earned bachelor's degrees in chemical engineering and chemistry from Lehigh in 1987 and 1988, studied at Princeton, and works now with DuPont's engineering department in Wilmington, Del. In 1996, the Luybens wrote Essentials of Process Control for a chemical engineering textbook series published by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. In 1998, they followed with Plantwide Process Control, which was also published by McGraw-Hill. The second book was co-written by Bjorn Tyreus, a Lehigh Ph.D. graduate who works for DuPont.