Karen Coym has a small army of gas canisters standing at attention, carefully insulated in one corner of her lab. The gases need to travel across the room and into her various workspaces -- in very precise amounts and mixtures.
To facilitate this, a delicate rainbow of long, thin pipes fans its way across the ceiling of Coym's lab. The vast majority of her tubing system is actually long, single pipes feeding into one spigot. Getting all those pipes hung from the ceiling at just the right angles was a neat trick, but the extra effort was worth it. The more joints in a system, the more places a gas might try to leak out. Coym is working with potentially toxic chemicals and safety, as always, is priority in University of Houston engineering labs.
Coym is currently a chemical engineering Ph.D. candidate in the UH Cullen College of Engineering. She is working with the university's $3.8 million contract with the City of Houston for Air Quality studies. The army of gas canisters are a small part of her arsenal for researching reduction of NOx in diesel emissions using absorption, and then desorption and reduction.
"I am trying to absorb the NOx on a catalyst so that I end up producing clean exhaust. The goal is to get a prototype developed to place on the exhaust of a diesel engine… and see how effective it is."
Coym is comfortable in her lab, surrounded by sophisticated equipment. She has a strong desire to continue her research and eventually teach at the university level. But she would admit to being torn. Industry originally drew her to Houston. "The strength of the faculty at UH is their grounding in real world experience," she says.
Real world experience is something Coym has learned the value of in her own life. As an undergrad, Coym was an active participant in the UH Cooperative Education program and the recipient of a generous scholarship package. Originally from James E. Taylor High School in Katy, Coym transferred to the Texas Academy of Math and Science at the University of North Texas for her junior and senior years.
"From there, the University of Houston was very attractive to me because of the promise of real job experience." Through the Co-op program, Coym was assigned to Lyondell-Citgo Refining LP as a process engineer at the age of eighteen. She was simultaneously enrolled in college classes.
As an intern, she was free to gain invaluable real-world experience with the freedom to learn as she went along
"One time I was totally confused because I thought the gas I was working with was moving from a low-pressure system to a high-pressure system." When she called for assistance, Coym was instructed to look at the pipe again. In textbooks, that kind of system is always pictured flowing from left to right. In the industry, direction of flow may appear to vary, depending on which side of the machine you are standing on.
"One of my favorite experiences at Lyondell-Citgo was the time I spent prowling through the man-ways in the refinery towers." Coym was the only person small enough to get down in the man-ways and conduct tower inspections on the internals, where she checked metal thickness for corrosion, weir height, down comer distance, and for plugging.
"I know it sounds weird," she says, "but just ask people who have been in the industry seemingly forever. Most of them have never had such direct experience with the internals of their equipment."
Coym immediately cites Chemical Processes from her first semester as the class that had the most influence on where she is today. She already knew she loved chemical engineering, and that first class effectively cemented her opinion.
She parallels this class experience with her industry experience. "Experience," she says, "is something you don't have until after you need it."