Today@Sam Article

Got A Problem? Williams Can Solvent!

July 14, 2015
SHSU Media Contact: Tammy Parrett

Associate professor of physical chemistry Darren Williams (above) and his team of student researchers are using solubility parameters to create solutions for many ‘sticky’ situations. —Photos by Brian Blalock

Think about every tangible thing you’ve ever touched. Every tabletop, doorknob, chair, or bicycle seat you’ve ever touched has been cleaned by a solvent. Because these objects are made from different materials, it is not likely that they are cleaned by the same solvent.

Solvents are a billion-dollar industry, and associate professor of physical chemistry Darren Williams is working to bring that industry to the side of academics.

He has done so by publishing extensively in this area, by participating as a guest lecturer in the Baker Hughes Distinguished Lecture Series and by teaming up with a group of scientists at the global chemical company Solvay to share how the oil and gas industry could benefit from using the Hansen Solubility Parameters to reduce their environmental footprint. 

“Crude oil is almost like salad dressing,” Williams said. “The water and oil are mixed inside the oil well, and companies want to find solvent additives to bring the crude to the surface without corroding the inside of the well. The HSPs are used to find combinations that will work.”

Williams's student researchers include (beside Williams on first row) senior John Fecco, (back row, from left) senior Robert Stanton and graduate student Jacob Perry.

Those who aren’t chemists may have never heard of HSPs. In fact, Williams was only introduced to the technique in 2007 by an undergraduate researcher.

“We were looking at the solubility of explosives in different solvents, and she came to me and said, ‘I found this Hansen Solubility Parameter Model in the literature; why aren’t you using that?’” he remembers. “It’s been around since the 1960s, but it was new to me. Since then, all of my research has centered around this technique, which allows me to come up with different recipes to target particular things that you want to remove.”

Two years after discovering the technique, Williams accepted his first grant in that area.

“In 2009, I received a grant to study how to remove baked-on epoxy from aluminum,” he said. “The company had parts that were glued together, and now they wanted to be able to take them apart. So we took some aluminum parts, cured some epoxy onto them and cooked them in a lab oven for three months. Our solvent blend was able to remove the epoxy faster than any single solvent.”

During that time he teamed up with Brian Loft, associate professor of mathematics, who created software to filter through the thousands of combinations of chemicals, allowing Williams and his students to prioritize recipes to take into the lab to test.

Williams and his team used Loft’s software to sort through more than 12 million possible solvent combinations and narrow their options down to seven or eight recipes. From there, they identified a solvent recipe that worked really well, and reported their findings back to the company.

He recently received a $150,000 grant from the Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program to generate new solvent blends to use for degreasing operations. SERDP supports the armed forces, NASA and the Department of Energy, bringing together government researchers who share the collective goal of solving environmental issues and reducing their individual footprint.

“It’s pretty generic, because the army may be degreasing something on a tank, the air force may be degreasing something on an airplane, and NASA may need something that is applicable in space,” he said. “They all have different functions, but it eliminates a lot of redundancy in the lab work. They can share our findings and apply them to the relevant aspects of their work.”

Although he is proud of the partnerships he has forged with industry-leading companies in industry, he is more excited for the opportunities that these partnerships will bring to his students and said he hopes that his students will enter the job market with an advantage over their competition.

“Academics and industry are on opposite ends of the resource spectrum, and if you can get the industry leaders to trust you, it can really benefit your students and their research,” Williams said. “Industry is dollar rich but personnel poor, and the university is the total opposite. We’re very personnel rich; we have graduate and undergraduate students that want to tackle real world problems, but we lack the money to fund a lot of their research.”

Despite the success he has had in his career in both industry and academia, Williams’s proudest accomplishments are his students. 

“I’ve always said that my alumni are my resume,” he said. “It’s not my vitae, it’s who they are and what they’ve done. If you want to know who I am, look to where my students have gone in both academia and industry.

“Sam’s a pretty unique place. There’s a culture of collaboration on campus, and that’s something that bigger universities struggle with,” he said. “We can get an enormous amount done with the few dollars that we have through cross-campus collaboration.”

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