Fenske Revolutionized Oil Refining
Merrell Fenske joined the Penn State chemical engineering and chemistry faculty in 1929 as the Great Depression was dawning, inspiring him to focus his research on aiding the Pennsylvania petroleum industry. He built Penn State’s Petroleum Refining Laboratory, and his research initially targeted research topics such as separation technologies, hydrocarbon chemistry, and lubrication, all important research subjects for Pennsylvania oil companies. Using thermodynamics and mass balance, Fenske published a theory in 1932 to predict the minimum number of stages needed in a distillation process, a key to the design of continuous fractional distillation, which is a group of processes vital to production and manufacturing across the chemical industry.
The “Fenske Equation,” as it became known, provided a shortcut to effective design distillation platforms and led to the development of new hydraulic fluids, recoil oils, and lubricants for the U.S. Air Force, U.S. Navy, and U.S. Army. He also standardized the specifications that led to large scale commercial production of these fluids in World War II. In addition, his research on extractive distillation was used in metal separations and purifications in the Manhattan Project. For his life work, he received numerous honors and awards over his 40-year career, including being named to the National Academy of Engineering in 1967. Penn State’s Chemical Engineering Units 1 and 2 were renamed Fenske Laboratory in 1973 in honor of his work at the University.