Professor Don Paul S Early Days at UT- Austin

Professor Don Paul’s Early Days at UT- Austin

by

Carl E. Locke, Jr

Professor Emeritus and Former Dean

School of Engineering

University of Kansas

My relationship with Prof. Don Paul began shortly after he joined the UT faculty. Initially, he was a customer for DTA equipment which I demonstrated for him at Austin’s Tracor, Inc in 1968. Later, he revived my quest for a PhD by appointing me to his first project on polymer blends. I was the second PhD recipient he supervised and my dissertation, “Modification of Polymer Blends for Reuse of Waste Plastics”, is dated December 1972. The presentation will briefly describe our early days together in Austin, the polymer blend project, and the positive influence he had on my subsequent career.

The background which resulted in me working for him begins in my enrolling as a freshman in ChE at UT in September 1953. Selecting Dr. Howard Rase as my MS supervisor

I feel sure I am the oldest former Don Paul advisee participating in this great celebration. We met while he was seeking to purchase a Stone DTA and I was the demonstrator/salesman for Tracor. He became my advisor after my Tracor position was dissolved. He needed someone to begin on a new project, I needed to return to pursuing the PhD, and continue buying groceries for my family. The project on reuse of waste plastics was his first contract to explore improving the properties of polymer blends. This project utilized chlorinated polyethylene to improve blends of polyethylene and polyvinyl chloride. In addition graft copolymers synthesized from polyethylene and polystyrene using radiation to initiate the grafting reaction were used to improve blends of polyethylene and polystyrene. Improvement of physical properties of the binary blends was achieved with varied results with greater improvement with the PE/PVC blends using CPE than obtained with the graft co-polymer of polystyrene on polyethylene.