Prof. Keith Brimacombe has long had a fascination with how things work, something he credits to his early years spent in a farming community in Alberta.
This fascination, coupled with what he sees as an engineer's obligation to society, led him into the sweltering confines of Canadian steel mills on a quest to understand and improve the processes involved in steel production.
It has also earned him dozens of awards, most recently the Canada Gold Medal for Science and Engineering, the nation's top award in the field, sponsored by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC).
"What I'm trying to do is to help Canadian companies be as competitive as possible on a world basis," he says. "These companies pay people, they pay taxes, they make our economy strong, and incidentally, they put money into NSERC."
Brimacombe, director of UBC's Centre for Metallurgical Process Engineering, has forged his reputation in industry and academia by combining complex mathematical modelling with fundamental studies of physical and chemical phenomena, and direct measurements on industrial processes. Founded in the mid-1980s, the centre operates with an annual research budget of about $2 million. From there, Brimacombe works with a team of a dozen or so graduate students and in frequent collaboration with colleagues in other science and engineering disciplines.
Brimacombe made his mark by putting up with the heat and dirt in steel mills to obtain in-plant measurements during the various stages in a metallurgical process, such as continuous casting of steel, and then using that information to complement computer models and laboratory research.
Although ultimately rewarding, working in the mills poses its share of research challenges, Brimacombe says.
"When you're in the plant, people are in the business of making steel or aluminum or copper and you have to work around their schedules. You don't necessarily have the kind of control you would like. That can be a real advantage and opportunity, or a difficulty, depending on how you want to treat it."
Regardless of the challenges encountered in gathering in-plant information, the light it sheds on research is invaluable, he says.
"The combination of in-plant measurements, computer modelling, and whatever measurements we undertake in the lab, is very powerful," he says. "We don't have to extrapolate many of our results to real life. They are real life."
Brimacombe's contributions to "real life" industry have led to numerous awards and recognition. He is an Officer of the Order of Canada. He has been awarded the Killam Memorial Prize from the Canada Council, the E.W.R. Steacie Memorial Fellowship from NSERC and the B.C. Science and Engineering Gold Medal. In 1987, he received the Ernest C. Manning Principal Prize reserved for a Canadian "who has shown outstanding talent in conceiving and developing new concepts, procedures, processes or products of potential benefit to Canada and society at large." Earlier this year, he was elected as a Foreign Associate of the National Academy of Engineering in the United States. The academy elects only eight foreign associates each year.
When the Canada Gold Medal was announced March 20, Jon Gerard, Secretary of State, Science, Research and Development, said: "Dr. Brimacombe has been a major contributor to the economic competitiveness of the Canadian steel industry and to the nationwide effort to build productive research links between industry and universities."
Brimacombe's most recent research includes studies led by Prof. Indira Samarasekera, who holds the Dofasco Chair in Advanced Steel Processing, on hot rolling of steel and aluminum. Hot rolling is a process through which cast metal is converted into metal products.
Another process research activity involves the development of a continuous casting mould that is intelligent.
"We're trying to make this process smart, to give it its own brain. We have a computational intelligence system that will take sensor signals as it assesses itself and the cast product, recognize the information, know when there is a problem and have the knowledge to diagnose the problem and provide a remedy on-line."
A smart process, Brimacombe says, will enhance quality and continuity in production as operators change from shift to shift.
He has also been working on flash smelting, a process that involves the addition of oxygen to nickel, copper or lead sulphide concentrates. The ensuing autogenous reaction, one which generates its own heat, leaves a liquid metal or oxide and a gas strong in sulphur dioxide -- a by-product that can be used for bleaching in the pulp and paper industry or as sulphuric acid. Brimacombe lists several key advantages in flash smelting: the use of oxygen to trigger the reaction enhances ease of operation and control and does away with the need for an additional fuel; the recovery of sulphur through the process is an environmental plus; and the ability to contain potentially harmful fumes, such as lead vapours, improves operational hygiene.
In the lab, using a two-colour pyrometer customized by one of his graduate students, Brimacombe can observe tiny particles of copper, lead or iron sulphide, as they are heated to more than 3,000 C. By observing the composition and behaviour of these particles as they are heated to the point of vapourization, Brimacombe can learn such things as how to improve dust recovery in the flash smelting process to reduce waste.
"Much of this research gets quite fundamental," he says. "But it has very strong practical implications in operation. And for me, that's always been the fun -- marrying fundamentals to real life. That's where all the excitement is."