James White awarded ACS Rubber Division's Charles Goodyear Medal

By Bruce Meyer, Rubber & Plastics News Staff

For James White, receiving the ACS Rubber Division's Charles Goodyear Medal represents a great honour from a voyage that began 50 years ago.

It's a trip that began in his hometown of Brooklyn, New York, and included interaction with some of the great names in polymer science along the way.

The journey included undergraduate work at Brooklyn Polytechnical Institute, where Austrian scientist Herman Mark set up the first undergraduate polymer education programme in the US.

Then it was on to graduate work at the University of Delaware and the research group of AB Metzner, where the two of them jointly developed the now-famous White-Metzner rheological model.

That was followed by a four-year stint at US Rubber-later Uniroyal-where the then-retired Melvin Mooney would come in and work in the library, White said.

Next was a 16-year tenure at the University of Tennessee, where he worked with Joseph Spruiell and John Fellers, and his polymer focus turned away from rubber and included such areas as liquid crystalline polymers.

The path finally brought him in 1983 to the University of Akron, where he still works full time as the Morton professor of polymer engineering.

It is a voyage that has included the publishing of more than 500 technical papers and eight books, including "Rubber Processing," a work long depended on by engineers and scientists.

And now that journey includes the most prestigious award given by the Rubber Division. In honoring White 5 May during its spring technical meeting, the division cited him for excelling in the "fundamental understanding of rheology and mathematical modeling of unfilled and filled rubbers and simulations of flow in batch and continuous mixing machines."

It also noted that he developed the first commercial twin screw extruder flow simulation software.

Early years

White's father encouraged him to study sciences and engineering. An electrical engineer, White's father had become a small business owner in partnership with White's grandfather.

That also is one of the reasons White chose a slightly different path of his own.

"I didn't want to live my life in my father's shadow because I had been brought up with he and my grandfather continually fighting about everything in the business," he said. "So I chose not to study electrical engineering as he did, or mechanical engineering, but chemical engineering."

Under Mark's leadership, Brooklyn Polytechnical had established itself-along with the University of Akron-as one of the early leaders in polymer science. He said the University of Akron had more resources, as Brooklyn Poly was a private school that "had hired in many bright old men that by the end of the 1950s and '60s had themselves retired."

His studies at the University of Del-aware were followed by four years at US Rubber, where he saw first-hand the difference between academia and working in industry. There he worked in the general areas of rubber rheology and processing.

"It completely changed my perspective because it was much more theoretical in a university," he said. "Industry was dominated by funding that was coming out of the federal government, much of it out of the Defense Department."

In academia, the professor has to take much more of the initiative, he said, whereas the decisions are made elsewhere when working for a company.

White said at US Rubber, however, that didn't mean everyone was on the same page. He recalled the director of research at US Rubber was leading work geared toward the eventual manufacturing of tires using ethylene propylene rubber.

Engineers from the tire division then came down to have discussions with the people doing research. The tire people wanted to talk about SBR, but were surprised when they found everyone was working on EP rubber.

Though White never worked directly with Mooney, he remembers one thing very clearly about the scientist who himself won the Charles Goodyear Medal in 1962. "He wrote the only technical reports that ever made any sense," White said.

After his time at US Rubber, he took an associate professor position at the University of Tennessee. "I wanted to decide the problems that I would work on and not have some upper manager in the company decide," he said.

At Tennessee he built the school's master's and doctorate polymer engineering program, which he said was the dominant part of a department that also included chemical and metallurgical engineering.

There he found out that working with the government-particularly the military-wasn't always an easy proposition. He and his research team had obtained research support from the Navy to work on liquid crystalline polymers.

White and his team reported their findings to the Navy and later found out second-hand that the research was further developed by the military for its use. White complained, asking why they hadn't been kept in the loop.

"They said, 'We supported you. Why should we?'" White said. "You never necessarily knew what became of work for the military. There were lots of frustrating things working with the government."

Headed to Akron

White moved to the University of Akron in 1983, where he started the Polymer Engineering Department, serving as chair and center director.

He came on the condition that polymer engineering be organised as a separate department with its own budget. White did this because of the political infighting that had taken place at Tennessee, where three disciplines were lopped together in one department, and the "chemical engineers thought they had a right to dominate because they had been there first."

At Akron, he turned his focus to rubber processing and compounding, studying and simulating flow in internal mixers and pin barrel extruders, along with twin-screw extrusion with and without reactions taking place. It was the latter activities that led to the first commercially successful software to simulate flow in twin-screw extrusion.

When he arrived in Akron, it was at a time when the town still boasted four seemingly healthy tire companies. Those firms provided enough funding for a three-year research project on rubber processing.

At the end of that period, however, all of the local tire companies were in trouble in one form or another, and the university had to continue the momentum of the research on its own. That included a reorganisation at the school that led to the formation of a separate college of polymer science and engineering.

In 1985, White founded the Polymer Processing Society a year after organizing a meeting for the Akron Section of the American Chemical Society on polymer processing. The session attracted speakers from around the world, and the organisers wanted to create a group of polymer scientists that was truly global in nature.

The society also started a new journal, "International Polymer Processing," for which White served as editor from 1986 to 2004.

The Charles Goodyear Medalist is a big believer in the need to publish, as evidenced by his extensive track record. White said if scientists don't publish their findings then new developments don't become known.

It also helps to somewhat pierce the veil of secrecy that has pervaded the rubber industry throughout its history. He remembers when he was trying to publish a paper while at US Rubber that someone in the company even objected to a line about rubber being viscoelastic. "US Rubber actually thought that was their secret."

Even now, White doesn't think there's enough collaboration between the industry and academia. "I've learned nothing about industrial problems from tire companies," he said. "They wouldn't speak about that. I learned everything from machinery companies."

White said he tries to impress upon his students the nature of the industry and its components, and how the technology developed. It's important, he said, for them to understand that there's not just one polymer industry, but a number of separate areas of expertise.

"It's good to have a very broad knowledge, but you really need to specialize to make a living," White said. "But if you don't have that broad knowledge, then you don't have a good perspective."

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James White awarded ACS Rubber Division's Charles Goodyear Medal from Rubber & Plastics News (a Crain publication)