“Research is what I’m doing when I don’t know what I’m doing”

“Research is what I’m doing when I don’t know what I’m doing.” Wernher von Braun said that. And I can relate. Much of what I do involves serendipity, which is just another way of saying that I wander from fact to fact until I assemble what I need to solve a problem. Here is a small example of the process …

Searching for information on Mustang Engineering (www.mustangeng.com) I turned up an article called “Apply Process Integration to Environmental Impact Assessment” (CEP, February 2009). It’s worth reading. In addition to the content, it has good biographical information on the authors, including …

Dr. Mahmoud El-Halwagi
Artie McFerrin Dept. of Chemical Engineering
Texas A&M University
College Station, TX 77843-3122
979-845-3484
el-halwagi@tamu.edu

I added his name to our experts file for future reference. Then I searched for his name + desulfurization and came up with the following dissertation, for which he was one of the approvers …

Experimental Investigation Of In Situ Upgrading Of Heavy Oil By Using A Hydrogen Donor And Catalyst During Steam Injection
A Dissertation by AHMAD A. A. MOHAMMAD
Submitted to the Office of Graduate Studies of Texas A&M University (2008)

And so it goes …

To read the full text of the article go to …
http://www.mustangeng.com/AboutMustang/Publications/Publications/0209CEPEnvironmentalImpactAssessment.pdf
For the full text of the dissertation, go to …
http://txspace.tamu.edu/bitstream/handle/1969.1/86051/Mohammad.pdf?sequence=1