Murtaza I. Gandhi, P.E., is a Principal Engineer for BakerRisk and a licensed Professional Engineer (Electrical) in the states of Texas and Louisiana. He has worked at BakerRisk for 10 years and has 17 years of experience in process safety, including process hazard analysis, layers of protection analysis, safety integrity level determination, fault tree analysis, fire and gas detector analysis, hazardous area classification, and process safety management (PSM) compliance auditing. Gandhi has more than five years of experience designing gas detection systems for toxic shelters. He holds a...Read more
Anthony G. Sarrack has performed risk analyses at BakerRisk for the chemical/petrochemical industry for the past 15 years. He led the development of the company’s quantitative risk assessment (QRA) methodology and toxic shelter modeling and testing capabilities. Sarrack has tested hundreds of toxic shelters around the world and has presented technical papers on related topics at multiple international conferences. In 2020, he wrote BakerRisk’s Best Practices document on toxic shelter design and operation. Prior to BakerRisk, he worked for three years as a control room operator at a nuclear...Read more
Claudio P. Ribeiro, PhD, is a Sr. Team Leader in the Chemical and Processing Engineering Group at BASF. His team executes design, rating, and troubleshooting projects in North America related to process simulation, distillation, heat exchangers, gas scrubbing, and phase separation. Ribeiro has more than 11 years of industrial R&D experience on process simulation and separation technologies. He is the author of one book (as editor), two book chapters, 42 articles in peer-reviewed journals, 5 U.S. patents, and 32 presentations at technical conferences. Ribeiro has a BS from the Federal...Read more
Carine S. Achoundong, PhD, is a Technology Team Leader for Acrylic Monomers in the BASF Petrochemicals division. In her previous role, she was a senior research engineer in the Chemical and Processing Engineering Group at BASF, focusing on the design, rating, and troubleshooting projects in distillation, absorption, and process simulation across North America. She holds a BS, MS, and PhD, all in chemical and biomolecular engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology. Achoundong is the author or coauthor of multiple peer-reviewed journal articles and presentations at technical...Read more
Eric Sun is a career roboticist and leads several projects in the Asia-Pacific region to tackle challenges at the Shanghai Dow Center (SDC) and surrounding sites. These challenges include eliminating confined space entries (CSEs), eliminating hydro-blasting cleaning, internal visual inspection, elevated height wall thickness measurement, logistics automation systems, etc. He graduated from the Guangdong Univ. of Technology in 2012 with a BS in automation. Before joining Dow in 2012, he worked at two of the four major robotics companies in the world, including FANUC and ABB. He has...Read more
Catherine Xu graduated from the Univ. of Texas at Austin in 2020 with a BS in mechanical engineering. She was a Dow co-op since 2018 working in manufacturing and engineering before starting full time as a robotics technology manager in Dow’s R&D robotics solutions team. She specializes in iterative design, prototyping, and computer-aided design. She has presented on the topic of R&D robotic solutions at the SPRINT Robotics Conference, ASME robotics conferences, and AIChE conferences.Read more
William Rifenburgh is a career roboticist and leads the robotics team at Dow Chemical’s Digital Operations Center — an innovation center charged with bringing in the latest, cutting-edge digital technology into Dow’s manufacturing operations. Rifenburgh has a dual MS in aerospace engineering and medical robotics from the Univ. of Houston and the Univ. of Strasbourg. Before joining Dow in 2017, he worked at various robotics research laboratories including IRCAD France, the Florida Institute for Human Machine Cognition, and the NASA Johnson Space Center.Read more
Frank Sebastianelli is a robotics engineer at Dow who has worked to get mobile robots into hard-to-reach and dangerous locations his entire career, whether in orbit during his time at NASA or deep inside plants during his time at Dow. He conceptualizes architecture of R&D robotic solutions and then contributes to the hands-on development of custom software and hardware solutions. He specializes in mechatronics and embedded software of field-ready, fully functional, mobile robots. Sebastianelli has a BS in aerospace engineering from the Univ. of Texas at Austin and is finishing his MS...Read more
This article outlines the steps used in a case study to troubleshoot a caustic scrubber that could not consistently meet design specifications.
July
2022
A robotics program can provide many benefits, from improved safety to cost savings. This article provides advice for launching a robotics program at your organization.
