Word: thermal
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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WESLEY C. CARRIGER Thermal, Calif...
Most present oil refining is done by thermal cracking-breaking crude oil's heavy molecules into lighter components by great pressure and heat. This process yields only 44% gasoline (the money-making product), leaves refiners with a great bulk of fuel oil and other by-products to dispose of. Phillips Petroleum Co. has lately found a way to convert some of these by-products into gasoline-through polymerization, which compresses wasted gaseous fractions of crude oil into the heavier molecules of gasoline...
Inventor Houdry has an entirely new approach. In his arduous attempts to make gasoline from lignite, he happened on a catalyst (an agent that accelerates chemical action without becoming part of the product it activates) which converted crude to gasoline without the great pressure or heat required in thermal cracking. Unable to get backing in France, he found...
...March 31, 1937, at Sun Oil's Marcus Hook plant hard by the Delaware River, engineers charged Houdry Unit 11-4 with 15,000 barrels of sloppy residuum after Sun's thermal cracking refiners had squeezed every drop of gasoline they could from the crude. Up went the heat to 900°. Pressure was applied. And as still men and panel men anxiously watched the gauges, the vaporized residuum was forced through the macaroni-shaped catalyst of silica and alumina. When 11-4 had done its work, yield sheets showed that the waste oil had given...
...parked automobile. The occupants of neither house nor car were injured, but Major General Westover died with his crew chief. Technical Sergeant Samuel Hymes. Ordered to inquire into causes was Major Joseph L. Stromme, who guessed that Pilot Westover had flown too slowly, got caught in a downward thermal draft...