Dr. Ken Nobe
UCLA Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering Department
Profile Summary
Ken Nobe is a world-renowned engineering scientist known for his early studies of catalytic air pollution control of exhaust emissions from automotive and stationary sources, and for his research on electrochemical processes including the kinetics and mechanisms of electrodissolution and electrodeposition, corrosion, electro-chemical energy systems, and electrodeposited nano-sized high performance soft and hard magnetics. During his career, he was honored with a UCLA Distinguished Teacher Award in 1962 and the Linford Award from the Electrochemical Society in 1992. He is the founding Chair of the UCLA Chemical Engineering Department and his passionate dedication to teaching and research have influenced many generations of chemical engineering students.
A Family Tradition
Ken Nobe was born in Berkeley, California. He earned his Bachelor of Science degree in Chemistry from UC Berkeley in 1951, continuing a family tradition his mother graduated from Berkeley in 1922, followed by her two brothers and younger sister in the late 1920s to early 1930s.
"It took me five years to get a bachelors degree because I was on the GI Bill of Rights, and I had moved around from college to college, at different universities, because I had to work so hard at Berkeley. I started in '46 and it was very difficult to get into classes because of so many returning veterans like myself causing overcrowded classrooms and things like that. I had to work so hard just to get to the next advanced course. I was looking for someplace easier, so I kept going to different schools, but I always ended up back at Berkeley."
Nobe then got a job in Murray Hill, New Jersey, across the street from Bell Labs, at the Air Reduction Research Laboratory to work on developing new organic polymers (polyacetylene) from monomers that organic chemists prepared.
"I went to work because I didn't know what an engineer did. I found out that it wasn't all that hard, and one didn't have to use so much of their education. I worked with just about all Ph.D. organic chemists, and I realized that to get a Ph.D. you didn't have to be all that smart. So, I decided to quit my job and go back to graduate school. To do that, I first went to Purdue for summer school. I didn't like it because it was so hot. Then, I went to Iowa State University for three quarters. I didn't like it because it was so cold."
The Greatest Good Mistake
Returning to California, Ken Nobe was planning to apply for graduate school in mechanical engineering at Berkeley. He was going to summer school at UCLA because his brother lived there, but he didn't realize that the deadline to apply to graduate school was one month earlier than for undergraduates, so he missed the deadline to apply for graduate school at Berkeley. The only place he could get into that year was UCLA.
"So I had to apply to UCLA. That was the greatest good mistake I ever had made for myself because I met Professor William Seyer. I guess he was the one person who understood me and left me alone. He just asked me what kind of problem I wanted to do for research. I picked one and he went ahead and got support for me from Dean Boelter [the first Dean of the UCLA School of Engineering and Applied Science]. I really learned at UCLA that to truly learn you have to learn how to learn yourself."
"I got in contact with Professor Seyer and then Professor Samuel Yuster. I was lucky, because both Professor Seyer and Professor Yuster were tremendous, with a lot of good ideas. I guess people have already said this about Professor Seyer."
Chemical Engineering behind the Ballpoint Pen
During his graduate study, Nobe learned that Seyer had been contacted by Patrick Frawley from Papermate Pen. Frawley had asked his wife if she knew anyone who could analyze the ballpoint pen ink, because the guy who invented the ink would only sell 50 pounds of it a day to Papermate. Frawley wanted somebody to analyze the ink and find out what was in it so he could make it himself. His wife said to contact Professor Seyer at UCLA Engineering since she knew he was here and they were both from Canada. So, Frawley contacted Professor Seyer.
"From what I heard, Seyer and his son set up a laboratory in Westwood to try to analyze the ink. He discovered that there were so many additives in the ink that there was no way they were going to find out what all was in that ink. So, Seyer, being a classical physical chemist, went about finding out the characteristics of good ballpoint ink. Then, he developed a new ink for ballpoint pens. Basically its publicized as quick drying, but what he did was to put hydroxyl groups on the organics in the ink so that the cellulose in the paper would absorb it. That's why the ink would disappear, but people thought the ink had evaporated. Anyway, he did that and it was quite an accomplishment, but people don't know about it, because it was an industrial development. It was a very important one, because it revolutionized the ballpoint pen industry."
"I always tell that story about Seyer to my students; this is the way you should really work to solve industrial problems."
Graduate School Days
As a graduate student, Nobe worked on two projects with Professor Yuster - one on seawater desalination and the other on air pollution for controlling auto exhaust emissions.
"I assisted Professor Yuster on two aspects. One was the non-catalytic afterburner for auto exhausts run by Peter Staudhammer, and another project, in which Dean Boelter had drafted Tom Connolly to measure the oxides of nitrogen in a water heater exhaust. Yuster said, Why don't you try to get rid of the oxides of nitrogen by the catalytic method. So his idea was to use alkaline earth and rare earth metal oxides, which I tried by impregnating the materials on wire screens placed in the heater exhaust pipe. At the time, I really didn't get much change, but the idea was set in motion by industry many years later. What we were trying to do was to decompose oxides of nitrogen catalytically. Since that time, NO was reduced with CO, hydrocarbons and things like that from auto exhausts, which we did here at UCLA long before anybody else did."
"I also worked on converting seawater to freshwater using membranes. Originally, the idea of Yuster was that when an electrolyte, like seawater, was in contact with a non-polar surface like air, there was negative adsorption of the ions at the interface, and there was roughly around a 7-angstrom layer of freshwater at the surface of seawater. Yusters idea was to skim off the freshwater layer. Then he got the idea of using membranes, I think while Karl Bernstein was doing the slicing of the freshwater from the surface of seawater with a microtome as an undergraduate. Karl came back to graduate school around the same time I did in 1953. Then, Yuster had Karl replace the air, which is non-polar, with a non-polar membrane with a little pressure to push the thin layer of freshwater through the membrane. In other words, the sodium ions and chloride ions were repulsed at the surface of the membrane and the freshwater layer moves through the membrane. I remember sometime around '55 when Peter Debye, a chemical physicist, who won the Nobel Prize, came to give a seminar here. Yuster talked to Professor Debye and he said, Oh yeah, that's a great idea, and to prove it works you need only to measure the osmotic pressure. I remember that point."
Nobe received the Papermate fellowship and wanted to finish his PhD work. However, neither of the projects was making that much progress at the time.
"At the time, in desperation and unbeknownst to Yuster, I just wanted to get something through a membrane. I tried cellophane and got separation of freshwater from seawater where the concentration of sodium chloride was basically 3 percent; it was substantially reduced. So when I left the project, Yuster got Dr. Srinivasa Sourirajan to extend the work I was doing by coating the cellophane membranes with silicon oil and non-polar stuff like that, and he got a better separation. Then, he tried cellulose acetate, which was better. Then, Sid Loeb, a graduate student, came on; he was about 40 years old, and he had a lot of industrial experience. They started playing around with casting cellulose acetate membranes and were able to develop an asymmetric cellulose acetate membrane which demonstrated the economic feasibility of reverse osmosis to convert seawater to fresh water. This really originated from the support that Dean Boelter gave to people like Professor Yuster who had a lot of imagination. Yuster died in the late 50s and so really did not get any credit for this, and I think that is probably why Yuster is not known to this day for developing the reverse osmosis membrane process. That process was developed at UCLA due to the foresight of Dean Boelter who was able to persuade the legislature to fund UCLA for doing that type of research. Boelter also obtained similar funding for his air pollution program. I don't think any other school of engineering had seawater desalination and air pollution research programs at that time in 1954."
Happenstance Turned Career
Nobe attributed his decision to stay and pursue his career at UCLA to the climate and culture created by Dean Boelter, Professor Seyer and Professor Yuster.
Nobe stayed at UCLA and became an assistant professor in the School of Engineering after he obtained his PhD. He advanced through the academic ranks to Professor in 1968 and became Chair of the Chemical, Nuclear and Thermal Engineering Department from 1978 to 1983, and founding Chair of the Chemical Engineering Department from 1983 to 1984. He became a world-renowned scientist for his studies of electrochemical processes including the kinetics and mechanisms of electrodissolution and electrodeposition, corrosion, electrochemical energy systems and electrodeposited nano-sized high performance magnetic materials; his group is also noted for their early work demonstrating the feasibility of the two-stage catalytic converter to remove NOx, CO and hydrocarbons (HC) from auto exhausts, the efficacy of rhodium catalysts for NOx reduction and CO and HC oxidation leading to three-way catalysts (TWC) for control of auto emissions, and the development of V2O5-Al2O3, V2O5-TiO2and Fe-Cr oxide-Al2O3 catalysts for selective catalytic reduction (SCR) of NOx from stationary sources (e.g., power plants). During his career, he received a UCLA Distinguished Teacher Award in 1962 and the Linford Award from the Electrochemical Society in 1992. His passionate dedication to teaching and research have influenced many generations of chemical engineering students.
In Retrospect
"I did go to a lot of different schools having the GI Bill, so I could compare different schools. I never found anything better than the University of California. Well, I never went to Harvard [laughs] I couldn't afford Harvard."
Ken Nobe and his wife Mary endowed the William F. Seyer Chair in Materials Electrochemistry at UCLA in 2000 in honor of his graduate research advisor, Professor Seyer.
In recognition of Professor Ken Nobes outstanding leadership and exceptional contributions to the Department, the UCLA Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering Department established in 2008 a Founders Lectureship in his name, to bring to the campus distinguished researchers in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and related disciplines.