| John Jechura Personal Web Page |
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Professional Background I have been formally trained as a chemical engineer and have been fortunate to have worked in industry for nearly 30 years. The progression of my professional career started with an interest in applying computers to solve engineering problems. This led to specific specialties in numerical methods & applied thermodynamics, to applications in fuels characteristics & production, and to strategic aspects of fuels usage. A small number of words to describe my life's path. Schools attended over the years (external links) Industrial experience (external links) URS Washington Division
National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) Marathon Oil & Marathon Petroleum Companies Organizations (external links)
American Petroleum Institute (API)
American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) Gas Processors Association (GPA) Colorado School of Mines Classes I have also had the good fortune to teach a couple classes at the Colorado School of Mines since 1997. Since I am not on campus full time it was convenient even early on to have the class notes & assignments available on the 'net. Depending on the day (and time of semester!) this has been fun, challenging, stressful, and rewarding experience. Most definitely a learning experience. Can't be beat as a part-time job. Petroleum Refining - CHEN 409 Process Dynamics and Control - CHEN 403(B) External links Colorado School of Mines main page
Colorado School of Mines Chemical Engineering page Colorado School of Mines academic calendar Conventional & Alternate Fuels I am constantly amazed as to the amount of information that is available at our fingertips by way of the Internet. When it comes to fuels, both conventional and alternate, I have found a variety of links that give very useful data. Publicly available crude oil assays: Chevron crude oil assays: North America (others from links at top of page)
The driving force behind much of the alternate energy investment in the United States will be due to the 2007 Energy Total crude oil assays Presentation given at Colorado School of Mines on February 11, 2009 Biofuels links Phyllis database of biomass composition
Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Billion Ton Vision report NREL publications & biomass documents database Aspen process models developed by NREL for biorefinery analysis Software & VBA Routines My first interest was the application of computers to engineering problems. Back in the olden days of computer punch cards & having to walk 2 miles uphill in the snow to the computer center to run your batch job overnight (only to find out the next morning that you made a single punctuation error!) this meant programming in Fortran. Nowadays the entry-level programming language of choice is a spreadsheet, usually Microsoft Excel. And if you really want to get fancy, you'll automate some of the work with VBA routines or do calculations with "live" VBA functions. One of the most annoying ommissions in Excel (at least up Excel 2003) is the lack of a routine for doing linear interpolation. I wrote a couple sets of VBA routines for use in my classes and have made them avaible at the request of former students (who usually contact me a year after starting their first job stating they'd sure like to use the routines if they could just remember where the code was). Here they are as BAS modules that can imported into a spreadsheet. Some software packages that I really like to use (external links) MathType
Polymath Mathematica Particle Fire (not really a software package but one of the coolest screen savers around - way better than flying toasters!) Personal Pages Burn Recovery Journal Cars |