Armando Corripio
Louisiana State University
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Armando Corripio served on the faculty in the Department of Chemical Engineering at Louisiana State University for 37 years until his retirement in 2005. Armando originally came to the U.S. from Cuba following the Bay of Pigs Invasion. He enrolled at LSU and received his B.S. in Chemical Engineering in 1963. He worked for Dow Chemical Company for five years before returning to LSU to receive his M.S. (1967) and Ph.D. (1970) in chemical engineering.
Profile
Armando Corripio was born in Mantua, a small town in the Western end of the island of Cuba. His father owned one of the two general stores in town and his mother’s family owned a small ranch a few miles out of town.
At the age of seven Armando moved to Marianao, a major suburb of Havana, to attend the Colegio de Belen, one of the most prestigious elementary and secondary schools in Cuba, administered by the Jesuits. He lived near the school with his mother. His father would spend two weeks with them each month and the rest of the time at the store in Mantua.
As a small child, and later when he went to spend vacations in Mantua, Armando liked to “help” his father in jobs (e.g. carpentry) around the store. His father, who had completed only fourth grade but taught himself enough accounting to do his own books for the store and even advise other accountants in town, used to help Armando with his math homework. One thing that amazed Armando was that his father was able to solve algebra word problems without using algebra. His techniques were akin to many chemical engineering techniques Armando later learned, such as defining a basis for calculations.
Being an only child, Armando also helped his mother around the house with dusting, polishing, and mopping. His hobbies were reading, watching TV, and playing chess, monopoly, and other games with his friends in the neighborhood. At chess he regularly defeated two University of Havana students of Medicine who boarded next door.
Most of his time at the Colegio de Belen, Armando was at or near the top of his class, and finished with the highest overall average of the class for the ten years at the school (Valedictorian).
When Armando finished high school all public universities in Cuba were closed because of the rebellion against Batista, so Armando enrolled at the University of Villanueva (The Catholic University) in chemical engineering — the only other engineering option was mechanical — although his vocational tests said his aptitude was for civil engineering. One factor influencing his choice of chemical engineering was his admiration for Dr. Ledon, his high school Chemistry teacher at Belen. Dr. Ledon was a professor at the University of Havana and taught at two high schools on the side. In addition, Armando was a member of the Chemistry Club at school, directed by Dr. Ledon. This influenced Armando’s decision toward chemical engineering, although he "erroneously thought that it had something to do with chemistry.” Once in it, Armando "loved everything about it, especially the math, the chemistry, the material and energy balances, and the unit operations.”
During the Christmas break of his freshman year, Castro ousted Batista and the 11th law passed by the new regime invalidated all academic work done by the universities that had remained opened during the rebellion. As a result, Armando’s university remained closed until June when an acceptable amendment to Law 11 was negotiated. Armando ended his freshman year in November and started his sophomore year one week later. He maintained the top overall average of his class for the first two years, edging his friend Alfredo Lopez, who had been his classmate since second grade.
In the middle of the second semester of his junior year, on the day of the Bay of Pigs invasion, the Castro regime occupied and closed the University of Villanueva for good. Armando was able to come to the U.S. with the help of his fiancée, Consuelo, and, after saving money by working as a porter in a department store in Miami, came with his friend Lopez to Louisiana State University (LSU) in February of 1962. After the first semester he married Consuelo and two semesters later graduated with his B.S. in chemical engineering. Lopez stayed in graduate school, received a Ph.D., and went to work for Exxon R&E, eventually rising to Vice-president for research.
Upon receiving his B.S. in 1963, Armando got a job with Dow Chemical Company, Louisiana Division, where he specialized in process simulation and automatic control. Armando’s first big success at Dow, less than two years after he joined the company, was the dynamic simulation, using an analog computer, of a 30-mile long brine line. The objective was to study the feasibility of doubling the capacity of the line by installing three booster pumps along its length, and to design a control system to prevent damage due to water hammer (inertia) effects. The simulation involved the numerical solution of non-linear partial differential equations. One unexpected result was that under certain conditions there would be vacuum created in the line, rather than high pressure. Tests on the existing line verified the results and a surge tank with appropriate control system was designed to prevent the vacuum.
Later he and Enos Bonham developed two computer programs to design multiple-effect caustic evaporators and a gas turbine combined cycle power plant, under Boyd Roane’s direction. These programs where used at Dow for decades in designing and operating a Chlor-Alkali plant. In developing these programs Armando learned a great deal in process design calculations, thermodynamics, and computer programming.
While consulting for Dow in 1977, he developed, in cooperation with Dow’s Dave Breton, a computer program to design a coal gasifier with a gas turbine combined cycle power plant. This program was also used to design and operate the plant, and the project inspired him to spend one year of sabbatical leave working with the Project Aspen team at MIT.
His five years in industry were extremely influential and instrumental in his getting a well-grounded view of chemical engineering as he was also taking graduate courses in the evening during this time. He was able to bring his field experience to the subjects he was taking in graduate school—automatic process control, heat transfer design, fluid mechanics, distillation design, optimization—and to apply what he was learning in his modeling and design work.
His boss at Dow, Charlie Jones, encouraged and facilitated Armando's studies. Once, they both flew to California on a Friday and worked almost around-the-clock on a project through the weekend so that Armando would not miss any classes. Jones used to tell Armando, “Dow’s main product is not chemicals, it is education.” The first time Jones said that was after Armando “spent a couple of months on a simulation project that was a total failure because of my misunderstanding of one aspect of it.”
He received his M.S. in 1967, at this time he was encouraged by Professor Paul Murrill, to enroll in graduate studies full-time in order to obtain his Ph.D. since he had completed all of his coursework. Under Murrill’s supervision, he obtained his Ph.D. in 1970. When Armando finished he was hired as an Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering at LSU.
During these formidable years, Armando met a handful of people that significantly influenced his life. At Dow, Armando was influenced by his boss Charlie Jones and by Boyd Roane and Enos Bonham. Jones taught him most of what he knows in instrumentation, and Roane and Bonham taught him the practical aspects of process engineering. At LSU, Armando was influenced by Professor Murrill in automation and also by Professors Jesse Coates and Bernard Pressburg in unit operations and process engineering. Professor Murrill encouraged Armando to pursue a Ph.D from the moment they met. Murrill also inspired Armando to go into teaching and helped get him the position at LSU.
Nevertheless, Armando’s most significant influence — and counted as the most memorable person he has known — is Manuel A. Suarez Carreño, Dean of Engineering and specialist in Sugar Engineering at the University of Villanueva of Cuba. Armando recounts, “I met him when he interviewed me for admission into the university in 1958. He told me I could choose to be a smart lazy student or a lazy smart student. The former uses his talent to learn steadily and avoid cramming down at exam time, while the latter relies too much on his smarts to be successful.” He inspired Armando, not only academically and professionally, but in all aspects of general life. Saurez was “a family man and of profound principles both in engineering, social justice, and the solution to Cuba’s problems.”
Suarez taught Armando two courses in the junior year, Sugar Engineering and Strength of Materials. On Saturdays, Armando would meet with a group of students at Saurez’s house and Saurez would instruct the students on “Organic Democracy,” a bottom-up form of government that was used at the time in Switzerland and Sweden. He thought that would be the kind of society they should work toward in Cuba after Castro was deposed.
After the Bay of Pigs fiasco made it impossible to depose Castro, they all came to the United States. Saurez worked for Bechtel for about ten years and then worked as an ad joint professor at the University of South Florida and later got a faculty position at Florida International University. The last time Armando saw Saurez was when he visited Armando about fifteen years ago, to tell him about his research work on ethanol production by hydrolysis and fermentation of elephant grass. Saurez suffered a stroke and passed away a few years later.
During his thirty-seven years of teaching, Armando strived (and succeeded) at being the kind of mentor that Saurez and Murrill were to him. He has never regretted his decision to become a professor and leave the industrial realm. The most enjoyable phase of his career, as well as the most significant aspect of his career, has been as a teacher. He enjoyed acquiring and teaching skills to students who became chemical engineers. In addition, he enjoyed learning new skills required to teach his students with the latest techniques. Many of the skills at which he became very good—like slide-rule calculations, analog and hybrid simulation, and Fortran programming—are now obsolete. This, however, allowed him to acquire new skills, like MathCad and MatLab programming, spreadsheets, DCS control applications, and PowerPoint presentations. He exclaims, “this has sure made life very interesting.”
All of this knowledge that he has imparted to his students over the years through his classes and his research program are his most significant contributions to the profession and society. “I think I helped them become productive and ethical in their jobs of designing and operating chemical plants,” Armando says, adding that “three of these are my two sons, Bernardo and Michael, and my son-in-law, Michael Nodier.”
Armando would like to be remembered as the “teacher that helped his students become the chemical engineers and citizens that they are. (I am already remembered this way by many of them.)” This statement can be counted as true as evidenced by his many teaching awards and accolades. Throughout his years at LSU, Armando was consistently one of the most popular and most beloved professors in the department, beginning with his first experiences as an instructor. In his second semester of full-time graduate study, he was also teaching as an instructor for the department. His students selected him as their favorite professor. Knowing that he was planning to go back to industry when he finished his Ph.D., they signed a petition that he be hired permanently into the faculty. “This got me the offer and convinced me to give teaching a try.”
Armando’s major prediction for the future of chemical engineering is that chemical engineers will continue to be innovative and will continue to figure out how to produce petrochemicals or their substitutes from coal and renewable raw materials. His greatest hope is that the universities will graduate enough “smart lazy students” who will be able to meet the challenges of dwindling petroleum resources. However, he is concerned that too many “lazy smart students” will graduate instead.
He advises new graduates entering the profession “to pledge to practice and transmit the profession of chemical engineering not only and not less, but greater and more beautiful than it was transmitted to them” (which he adapts from The Athenian Oath). To students entering college, he advises that they not select the profession for the potential high salaries but for the good they can do to society by becoming the best chemical engineers they can be. On a more practical level, he also advises that they concentrate on learning their math, physics, and chemistry as much as possible. In his words, “the real bottom line is not the grades they earn, but how much they learn.”
When asked if there was anything about him that few people knew, Armando recounted the following:
In my junior year I was arrested by the Castro secret police (i.e. KGB) while attending a weekday Mass at a Catholic Student Center near the University of Havana. I was finger-printed, photographed, interrogated, and released twelve hours later after being forced to sign a bogus made-up charge. It was an intimidation technique they used on many young people. Because of the lack of civil rights under the communist regime, they could have kept me as long as they wanted without trial.