Meet Process Engineer Will Baud

Welcome to the latest in a series of AIChE blog posts profiling process engineers, a diverse group of professionals spanning multiple industries and regions. In this series, we profile process engineers who work in a wide range of fields, including petrochemicals, pharma, bulk chemicals, food, or any process-intensive industry.

Are you a member and process engineer interested in being profiled? We’d love to hear from you via this volunteer opportunity. Please also check out our online discussion group specifically for process engineers. You can find out about these initiatives and join our efforts by visiting aiche.org/process-engineers.

This month, we introduce you to Will Baud, Process Design Engineer at Endress+Hauser. He discusses the path that led to his career in process engineering, overcoming challenges, and the importance of his work. 

Tell us a bit about your work as a process engineer.

I work for Endress+Hauser, where we provide products, services, and solutions that help our customers better operate and automate their chemical production processes. Many professionals in the chemical engineering world will recognize our brand for its line of premium process instruments, such as some of the world’s most accurate Coriolis flowmeters.

My role as a Process Design Engineer is aptly titled because I design process engineering solutions for our clients. As a chemical engineer, I love the technical diversity that this role affords me. Instead of being tied to just one plant process for a company, I get to learn and contribute to processes for a variety of companies across different industries such as oil and gas, food and beverage, power and energy, and all kinds of advanced manufacturing.

Since Endress+Hauser manufactures instruments for measuring process variables like flow rate, pressure, temperature, and others, much of my team’s engineering design work centers on providing expertise at the point of measurement. We focus heavily on achieving accurate process measurements and doing so in a reliable and automated fashion.

Some of my recent projects include:

• Process training units for hands-on learning in university laboratories and corporate training programs
• Wireless measurement system for ethane crackers
• Paint product sampling skids for physical properties analysis and data logging in cloud servers
• Overfill prevention system for asphalt storage tanks
• Chemical dosing for water treatment and reuse in large manufacturing facilities

I’ve also been involved in engineering initiatives that are very contextual to current events in the world. During the COVID-19 pandemic, I assisted in the design of vaccine production systems, particularly with regard to accurate delivery of vaccine dose quantities. This year, my team is seeing a surge in interest for projects related to renewable energy and improved sustainability. We have begun developing designs for metering skids to measure the transfer of key resources like hydrogen gas for fuel and supercritical carbon dioxide for sequestration.

Why did you become a process engineer?

My father worked in process engineering roles in the oil and gas industry for more than thirty years. He has been and continues to be the largest influence on my choice of career. When I was preparing to graduate high school, my father encouraged me to consider chemical engineering for an undergraduate degree because it can be broadly applicable for someone with skills and interest in math and science. I was not sure at the time that I wanted to work as a process engineer, but I took his advice and majored in chemical engineering.

My time in college gave me proper exposure to process engineering, not just through my classes, but also through work experiences. I worked one summer in a specialty chemical facility and another at a paper production plant. I loved the way that process engineering work offered a good blend of theoretical work in a desk setting with hands-on work at the equipment level. The days passed quickly, and I personally found the work to be very energizing for me!

I enjoy the diverse challenges that come from my technically demanding environment on a daily basis.

As I was preparing to graduate from college, I had a few opportunities to start working as a process engineer right out of school. However, I also had a less traditional but very intriguing option available to me through a program called Orr Fellowship. The Orr Fellowship provided two years of high-quality business leadership development through full-time work at a designated partner company in the business/technology sector, along with a variety of resources, networking, and programming. This step in my career appealed to me as a unique chance to learn in ways that were hard to achieve in a classroom setting and to develop more generally applicable skills for whatever direction my career took next.

It is not uncommon for engineers to pursue a Masters in Business Administration (MBA) degree at some point in their careers, and I saw this opportunity with Orr as a great chance to begin exploring and developing more of my business acumen. So, for my first job out of school, I enrolled in the Orr Fellowship program and worked at a software startup company that partnered with the program.

Upon finishing my Orr Fellowship, I still had a love for process engineering and desired to return to this line of work. I began working at Endress+Hauser, and I have been deepening my process engineering knowledge ever since.

I enjoy the diverse challenges that come from my technically demanding environment on a daily basis.

What are some of the biggest challenges you face in your role as a process engineer?

Finding empirical data and even working without it are a couple of the biggest challenges I’ve faced. When my team and I develop a new process design, there is typically no previously existing data for the exact process we are engineering. Instead, I’ve had to rely on references of similar nature, and make reasonable assumptions to bridge the gap between previously employed systems and newly designed ones.

Depending on the situation, my team may partner with our client to build a pilot system of some sort. Pilots can be very helpful, but they will still not completely replicate the end stage of the system we want to use. I have found it helpful to get multiple contacts, both internally and externally, involved in design reviews early on and throughout the iterative design process. Even after a new design is deployed and released, we continue to monitor its service in the field for further information that can inform possible re-designs moving forward.

A diverse community that shares their experiences can bring some much-needed clarity to new design evaluations and legacy equipment handling.

Another challenge, at the opposite end of the product lifecycle from new design, is properly using, maintaining, and servicing old equipment. Old equipment is notoriously difficult to understand in terms of its original design, process specifications, and operating procedures. Operator practices may get handed down over time, but the initial constraints of the equipment can be easily lost. Being very disciplined with documentation and organization are some of the best ways I’ve found to overcome this challenge around losing track of how process equipment is supposed to work.

I’ve found the AIChE community to be helpful in combating both sets of challenges that I’ve mentioned here. A diverse community that shares their experiences can bring some much-needed clarity to new design evaluations and legacy equipment handling.

How is your work as a process engineer critical to your particular job assignment or industry?

As a process engineer in the team and context that I work in, I provide overall design verification to our process equipment solutions. Other engineers on my team specialize more in mechanical and electrical areas. My function focuses on the operational viability and safety of the process design. With purely mechanical and electrical competencies, we might produce a process that powers on and physically holds together, yet without the process engineering knowledge to guide our solution, the equipment may never work safely or efficiently in its intended service. I am able to contribute value through calculations for mass and energy balances, pressure drop, material/chemical compatibility, HAZOP analysis, maintenance and troubleshooting procedures, and more.

What do you think is most important about what you do as a process engineer?

I take the safety function of my job very seriously. In our process designs, my team and I always make sure that our equipment components are fully rated for the process conditions of their service. We value innovation and improvement in process design for a variety of other factors, too, such as cost savings, man-hours reduction, and carbon footprint mitigation. But safety for people is paramount, and I’m most proud of some process solutions we’ve produced that are inherently safer than the processes that existed before. These inherently safer designs typically involve automating a previously manual process and implementing safe interlocks in the system that reduce risk, even when system components fail.

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