Prof. Wachs to receive two top honors

Israel Wachs, professor of chemical engineering, has been chosen to receive two top honors - the Award for Industrial Innovation from the American Chemical Society's Southeast Region, and the Industrial Practice Catalysis and Reaction Engineering Award from the American Institute of Chemical Engineers.

Wachs will receive the awards at the ACS Southeast Regional Meeting in November in Atlanta and at AIChE's annual meeting in San Francisco, also in November.

The awards are being given in part for a catalytic process Wachs invented that converts waste gases from paper pulp mills into formaldehyde and other valuable chemicals. For his work in that area, which culminated in a collaboration with Georgia-Pacific Corp., Wachs received the 2002 Clean Air Technology Award from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Wachs's process, which was successfully tested by G-P in mobile pilot plants for two years, converts a methanol-water waste stream contaminated by sulfur compounds and small amounts of hydrocarbons known as terpenes into formaldehyde. It also significantly minimizes most of the emissions of carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide, two potentially harmful by-products of traditional pollution-control methods.

Andrew Gibson '52, former process-improvement manager at G-P, says the company found that a mill producing 2,000 tons a day of pulp would save $500,000 to $1 million a year using the new method to get rid of the contaminated methanol waste stream.

In the past three years, Wachs has traveled widely in the United States, Europe and South America to lecture on the new process and its application not only to pulp mills but also, potentially, to the production of low-cost petrochemicals from natural gas.

Last year, Wachs and Sukwon Choi, a Ph.D. candidate in chemical engineering, were invited to give a presentation on the new catalytic process in Washington, D.C., at the annual Exhibition and Reception of the Coalition for National Science Funding.

Feature articles on the process have been published in the journals "Pollution Engineering" and "Chemical and Engineering News."

Wachs, who holds two dozen patents, is a pioneer in the use of Raman spectroscopy to characterize catalysts.