My attempt of restoring the TGA and measuring the ceramic degradation turned out to be a disaster. The strong gas flow around the test sample made the measurement extremely noisy and unreliable, even though we implemented analog cable shielding and multiple digital filters in our data acquisition system.
John wasn't concerned. Rather, he encouraged us to solve the problem from another angle and to satisfy our GRI program manager. The program had grown bigger and involved multiple research universities. The interest was that burning natural gas rather than coal or oil is more environmental friendly. A ceramic radiant burner is even more benign than an open-flame gas burner because the flame is trapped inside a porous ceramic thus lowering the flame temperature and the harmful NOx emission.
Another university was doing the theoretical prediction of the temperature profile inside the burner and the temperature would determine the life of a ceramic burner. However, the progress was too slow to the liking of our GRI sponsor. John wanted the OSU to give a try. I spent weeks in the computer lab above the university bookstore. The Turbo PASCAL compiler's static memory was too small for our numerical model. Also in order to keep the finite difference model stable, a very small time step must be used to reach a steady state solution. We tackled many problems like dynamic memory allocation, large time scale convergence, and computer graphics.
Eventually, our model was accepted by the scientific journal Combustion Science and Technology and the reviewers provided overwhelmingly positive feedback. This also made GRI very happy. We were invited to the project review meeting at GRI's headquarters in Chicago. At this meeting, we presented a PC-based program combining a graphic user interface and the Turbo PASCAL finite difference model.
After the meeting, GRI started asking John for temperature predictions for various burner design ideas. Since the PC model was still slow and we did not want to travel to the university bookstore every time we wanted an answer, we decided to make the code run on the DEC VAXstations in the Koffolt Workstation lab. The code was further ported into "C" that can be run anywhere.
The project was renewed by GRI multiple times, and John started to have many other students and researchers involved. One day he was very excited telling me that one of his students had successfully demonstrated that atomic hydrogen sustained by microwave eroded ceramic, exactly as predicted by his brilliant theory on gas burner degradation.
John was a tireless researcher, inventor, and Material Science professor. Importantly, he was an relentless fighter facing challenges in science and research projects.
I was extremely fortunate to have John as one of my post-doctoral research advisers. Later, we worked on ceramic joining problems and surface science issues. One of the projects was from the Edison Welding Institute where I later found my first non-academic employment.
Today we celebrate John's life to remember his scientific fortitude, innovative spirit, timeless teaching, and care for the students. When we start each new day, we enjoy life from John's contributions to the humanity in academic research, clean energy, new ceramic materials, biomaterials, nanocomposites, and oxygen sensors etc.
We miss you, John!
