The catal­y­sis club of Philadel­phia is pleased to announce Dr. Chuck Coe as the recip­i­ent of the 2010 Catal­y­sis Club of Philadel­phia Award, in recog­ni­tion of his out­stand­ing con­tri­bu­tion to adsorp­tion sci­ence, catal­y­sis, and appli­ca­tions of cat­a­lysts for organ­ic syn­the­ses.

Chuck joined the Chem­i­cal Addi­tives divi­sion of Air Prod­ucts and Chem­i­cals after he obtained his PhD in inor­gan­ic chem­istry from Carnegie Mel­lon Uni­ver­si­ty. While at Air Prod­ucts, Chuck devel­oped a com­mer­cial cat­a­lyst for accel­er­at­ing the cure of poly­ester sheet mold­ed plas­tics. This prod­uct is still being sold some 30 years lat­er. Ear­ly in Chuck’s career, he trans­ferred to the Cor­po­rate research group at the Com­pa­ny head­quar­ters and devel­oped an exten­sive exper­tise in mol­e­c­u­lar sieve sci­ence, allow­ing him to con­tribute to a num­ber of impor­tant suc­cess­ful com­mer­cial­ly improved prod­ucts and process offer­ings. For many years, he teamed with project lead­ers across busi­ness units to enable the devel­op­ment of improved adsor­bents and cat­a­lysts based on build­ing structure/property rela­tion­ships tar­get­ed ini­tial­ly at spe­cif­ic appli­ca­tions. He led the team that cre­at­ed improved adsor­bents for the non-cryo­genic pro­duc­tion of oxy­gen and was a major con­trib­u­tor to improve­ments in car­bon mol­e­c­u­lar sieves that allowed the pro­duc­tion of high puri­ty nitro­gen. His great­est com­mer­cial suc­cess involved the mod­i­fi­ca­tion of an adsor­bent used to puri­fy nitro­gen tri­flu­o­ride that is used in the pro­duc­tion of inte­grat­ed cir­cuits.

Chuck was also instru­men­tal in devel­op­ing new ana­lyt­i­cal meth­ods and instru­men­ta­tion to obtain fun­da­men­tal infor­ma­tion on small exper­i­men­tal sam­ples. In this area, his most notable accom­plish­ment has been estab­lish­ing an advanced high pres­sure microbal­ance sys­tem that oper­ates up to 100 atm in the pres­ence of up to 50 vol% steam that sup­ports car­bon diox­ide cap­ture, hydro­gen pro­duc­tion, and inte­grat­ed fuel/energy process­es. Chuck was also a key mem­ber of the DOE Cen­ter of Excel­lence on Car­bon-cen­tered Hydro­gen Stor­age Mate­ri­als and cre­at­ed a unique dif­fer­en­tial vol­u­met­ric adsorp­tion appa­ra­tus for mea­sur­ing high pres­sure hydro­gen isotherms on 50 mg sam­ples, enabling the devel­op­ment of advanced hydro­gen stor­age mate­ri­als. Before retir­ing from Air Prod­ucts, Chuck was named a strate­gic tech­nol­o­gist for the Cor­po­ra­tion and pro­vid­ed inter­nal con­sul­ta­tion for a broad range of mate­ri­als char­ac­ter­i­za­tion issues involv­ing cat­a­lysts, adsor­bents, and mem­branes. His accom­plish­ments have led to 34 issued US patents, 29 peer-reviewed pub­li­ca­tions, and numer­ous invit­ed lec­tures.

Since retir­ing, Chuck has joined the Chem­i­cal Engi­neer­ing fac­ul­ty at Vil­lano­va and is shar­ing his knowl­edge with the next gen­er­a­tion of sci­en­tists.

Please join us in con­grat­u­lat­ing Chuck on receiv­ing the 2010 Catal­y­sis Club of Philadel­phia award.