McDaniel is a catalyst of change

Bartlesville, Okla. — Max McDaniel, an expert in catalysts at Chevron Phillips Chemical Co., has worked for the same company for 44 years and in polyethylene that whole time.

He's even in the same building and the same desk.

"Well, I can't claim that I reasoned it all out when I came here. I was just happy to have any job," he said, chuckling. "But I don't think I could have done better. I've been happy to be here."

McDaniel, 70, is senior fellow scientist at Chevron Phillips. His office is in the pilot plant area in Bartlesville, where he helps develop catalysts, along with about a dozen other scientists and an equal number of technicians.

"Different catalysts make different kinds of polymers. That's why we have so many different types of catalysts," he said.

Catalysts play a key role in new materials. In petrochemical production, chemical companies need catalysts to make the reaction happen and then to tailor the actual polymer.

"In our business, the way you design new polymers is to make new catalysts," McDaniel said. "The catalyst determines what kind of polymer you make — the character of the polymer and how it molds as well as physical properties. And so, we start by modifying the catalyst."

McDaniel's name appears on 385 patents, but he said it takes teamwork. Nearly every patent has more than just his name on it; they include many coworkers at Phillips.

"What I do is play around in the lab until we think we have something that might be an improvement. We give it to the pilot plant. They run it, make several thousand pounds of polymer. Then we send it out here to the application side and they tell us what's wrong with it," he said.

His biggest innovation was discovering that chromium catalysts naturally impart long chain branching into polyethylene, allowing scientists and chemists to tailor PE to a wide range of uses.

Now his lifetime of achievements that changed the PE industry have earned him a place in the Plastics Hall of Fame.

McDaniel was nominated for the hall by Don Peters, a retired blow molding engineer who worked with McDaniel at Chevron Phillips.

"He is one of the most brilliant people who accomplished so much technically that benefited not only Phillips but also the industry. But it mostly wasn't one huge thing. It was a little bit by little bit improvements here and there that added up to ​ huge improvements in the processes of polyethylene and properties," said Peters, who went into the Plastics Hall of Fame in 2000.

Several other key people nominated by Peters have gone into the Plastics Hall of Fame, including in 2015, Donald Norwood, the inventor of the loop reactor to produce polyethylene.

In 2014, Robert Banks and J. Paul Hogan, credited with the foundation of polypropylene and polyethylene, were posthumously inducted into the Plastics Hall of Fame. The innovation happened in 1951, as they were trying to convert propylene into high-octane gasoline. They hit on long-lasting catalysts using different metals, including chromium.

"In addition to the liquid gasoline, they got a solid white power, which was crystalline polypropylene," McDaniel said. "They realized right away what they had."

He considers them all role models. But the one who took him under his wing when McDaniel arrived at Phillips in 1974 was Marvin Johnson, a scientist and longtime catalyst expert, who died last year.

"He was really helpful. He'd call me out at night and say, 'Look, come out later today and we'll work into the night, and I'll show you how to do things.' He did it to help me because I was young," McDaniel said.

McDaniel and the other catalyst researchers have access to the trove of earlier work by those pioneers.

"You try to extend something you know to something you don't know. And sometimes, depending on how big of an extrapolation it is, sometimes it works. A lot of times it doesn't, and you find out something new. So, that becomes your new extrapolation point for something else," he said.

But for someone working the same job, sitting at the same desk for 44 years, McDaniel still gets excited about chemistry. It's the thrill of the unknown every day, or as he said, "If you know what the results are gonna be, it's not really research; it's engineering."

Don Peters said McDaniel can focus.

"He's a very single-minded person. Once he starts on something, he works on it until he finds an answer," Peters said.

Peters and other plastics people at the company say McDaniel doesn't always strictly follow the advice of management.

"He kind of does his own thing, but he does it in line with the objectives of the company," Peters said.

McDaniel said the often unpredictable, experimental nature of catalysts work makes it difficult to follow hard corporate mandates. Just look at Hogan and Banks.

"You're never quite sure what's going to happen. And when it does, you try to put it into some coherent theory, and that lasts until the next experiment. Then you start all over again," he said. "It's science. That's the way science works. You come up with a theory. You try to prove it, disprove it. And then you modify your theory."

McDaniels said Chevron Phillips researchers use computers to analyze results. But there are still a lot of scientists mixing things together to see what happens, he said.

"We try to do it intelligently, rather than statistically. That's my preference," he said.

The mental challenge can be thrilling. He explains: "Well, you fire a shotgun and each point has no logic to it, you're just looking for patterns. And there are some machines that will do that. But it's hard to do that in our field. So, we still try to reason the way out. The reasoning is often wrong, but at least we're going in to see the logic behind it. And that's where the real satisfaction comes from, when you finally understand something that you've been beating your head on the wall for months, years. And suddenly the light shines and you go 'wow.'"

McDaniel, who is from Fort Worth, Texas, was 10 years old when the Russians launched Sputnik in 1957. So, how did he first get interested in chemistry?

"Probably the same way a lot of other scientists did. I liked to make fireworks when I was a kid. All kinds of bombs and rockets, we made. It started about third grade, cutting off all the match heads off of a couple boxes of matches and packing it into a pipe. I was lucky I still have all of my digits here because we had a lot of close calls," he jokes, holding up his hands. "Stupid, but it gave you an interesting chemistry lesson."

McDaniel and a friend spent Saturdays at the library. Their source of rocketry information: Encyclopaedia Britannica.

He moved to North Africa for high school where his father was stationed as an Air Force rescue pilot.

"He participated in the early space program. That's what we were doing in North Africa. He'd be on call. If the rockets came down in the North Atlantic, he'd be the one that would fly over and drop the divers and rescue the guys," McDaniel said.

McDaniel said he applied to become a pilot, but his eyes weren't good enough. But there were rockets. He had plenty of wow moments.

"We had a lot of crazy incidents. Our house was right on the desert, and so you'd think you could get out in the open where no one's going to get hurt or anything. We'd make these rockets. And there was so much we didn't understand, so most of it was trial and error, the guidance and all that. We didn't understand any of that. So, they were all mostly uncontrolled. We'd go out a half-mile in the desert and set the thing off," he said.

Sometimes they blew up on the launch pad.

His high school friend's father wasn't happy about it. So, the boys took him along to show him how safe it was.

"We had packed an aluminum tube. It was one of our better attempts," McDaniel said. "It took off. Went pretty high. Came right back down. Hit his dad's house and then went under the cars, spinning around."

That was the end for his friend … but not really.

"He said, 'From now on, you're not firing any more rockets.' Those were his exact words. And so from then on, my friend and I would make the rockets, but when it came time to light them, I'd light them so we could say that he didn't fire them," McDaniel said.

Then there were the Soviets: "While were there in North Africa, the Russians came in and they had a trade fair. And they had all these, you know, like a smaller version of what we'd call the World's Fair. They had all these things showing the advanced technology of Russia vs. the West. And we noticed that one of the displays was these beautiful glass bottles of all these chemicals. Of course, they were different colors of chemicals. And we looked enviously at this display, and so after the fair was over, we went there on the last day and said, 'What are you going to do with those chemicals? Are you gonna ship them back to Russia or what?'"

Long story short, the Russians gave the high schoolers the chemicals. One bottle of an orange substance turned out to be potassium chromate — McDaniel's first experience with chromium!

"We learned later, just through trial and error, that if you mixed one part of that with four or five parts of potassium chloride, it made one hell of a bomb. So, that's a catalyst. That was first experience with a catalyst," he said.

"That's why when I went to school, later the word catalyst still had magic for me," McDaniel said.

McDaniel went on to earn a bachelor's degree in chemistry in 1969 from Southern Illinois University, then a master's degree and doctorate from Northwestern University.

He spent a post-doc year in Lyon, France, at a government-funded catalyst institute. He studied oxygen-18 diffusion in titania catalysts. That didn't involve plastics, although by coincidence, it has come in handy at Phillips as the team later worked on chromium and silica titania as a catalyst.

In fact, as a Ph.D. student, McDaniel didn't know much about plastics at all. After all, catalysts are widely used in many industries. But one day his professor showed him an article in the Journal of Polymer Science, written by Paul Hogan of Phillips. That was his first introduction to Phillips, his future employer.

The paper made an impression.

"I can remember the first lines of that paper. He said something to the effect of, there's been a worldwide study of chromium catalysts, to the extent that sometimes the basic chemistry of the chromium was forgotten. And maybe in a few cases repealed!" McDaniel said, laughing at the thought. "That's how it started off. And the thing that was memorable about it, especially for me at that age was, he was really jabbing the academics of his day."

McDaniel was the first scientist to discover the link between chromium catalysts and long-chain branching, or LCB.

Why is long chain branching important? He explains: "You have polyethylene chains and think of, like, a pile of spaghetti. You're trying to pull one strand out, and it gets entangled up with all the others. Now if that strand had a branch on it — if it's a Y instead of a just a straight line — now it gets even more entangled, right? You try to pull it out, now it's got two arms. And they are both entangled."

Sometimes you want that branching in polyethylene and sometimes not. In blow molding, branching can be very important, he said. But it's not so important for film, for example. In rotational molding, too much branching can lead to warping.

"What's important is that you can control it with the catalyst," McDaniel said.

It was a major breakthrough. Through that chromium/LCB connection, nearly all molding behavior can be manipulated, including melt strength; melt fracture; extrusion pressure; die swell; environmental stress cracking; clarity; impact- and tear-resistance in film; sag-resistance in sheet and the rotomolding warpage issue.

Through precise control of the branching, each type of PE can be fine-tuned for each application, he said.

From wide experimentation, McDaniel concluded that the driving force for all the molding responses goes back to a fundamental chemical principle called the "raw electron deficiency" of the catalyst. It's at the heart of all catalysts, he said.

The monomers of ethylene and propylene have a double bond between carbon atoms. The double bond is rich in electrons, McDaniel said. The catalyst, which is hungry for electrons, helps bring the monomers together and make the chemical reaction that produces the polymer, a chain of molecules.

The raw electron deficiency of the catalyst resulted in the discovery of a new intramolecular mechanism for the formation of long-chain branching. The insight was extended to metallocene catalyst resins as well.

"The catalyst lets them come together because they're sharing electrons," McDaniel said. "So, the activity of any of these catalysts — and the type of polymer they make — depends on how hungry that catalyst is for electrons. And you can manipulate that through the chemistry."

McDaniel has won many awards and honors, including Oklahoma Inventor of the Year and the American Chemical Society's Southwest Regional Chemist Award covering a five-state region. In 1991, Phillips honored him with the first-ever Innovation Excellence Award for a researcher who made the biggest financial and scientific contribution to the company. He won it again in 2003 for metallocenes using the manipulation of LCB.

He went on to help invent and commercialize many new polymer and catalyst technologies used by PE plants throughout the world. That has led to lots of global travel.

"I've always enjoyed that," McDaniel said. "We have a large family of licensees, and they need help from time to time. I got to go around and usually learned as much as I taught when I went on those things."

He's always learning. That makes it fun, he said.

Read the Viewpoint on the Hall of Fame and find links to other profiles.