A chemical engineer who created a "revolution in mobility" has captured this year's Charles Stark Draper Prize offered by the U.S. National Academy of Engineering. The biennial prize, whose $450,000 value makes it the richest in the field, was awarded last week to Vladimir Haensel for developing a technology at the heart of refining gasoline that has also contributed to the plastics industry.
Father of clean fuel. Haensel at Universal Oil Products in the 1940s.
Working at Universal Oil Products Co. in Des Plaines, Illinois, in the late 1940s, Haensel found that platinum could serve as a much better catalyst than silica-alumina for turning crude oil into gasoline. The method, called platinum reforming or "platforming," led to much cleaner and cheaper gasoline.
The 83-year-old Haensel, who immigrated from the Soviet Union in 1928, has taught at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, since 1980.
