News

Enhanced safety measures are being made for structures that are exposed to liquefied natural gas (LNG) fire.

Dr. Filippo Gavelli from Blue Engineering and Consulting Company (BLUE) and Dr. Qingsheng Wang, a professor with the Department of Chemical Engineering, have led a large-scale experiment testing different coatings on steel beams and examining how they hold up in a fire. The project is a collaboration between BLUE, the Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station (TEES), and Texas A&M Engineering Extension Service (TEEX). It’s sponsored by the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT).

Detailed Story here

We proudly congratulate Mohamed Abdalla for winning 1st Place in the poster competition at the 2025 SPE-GCS Data Science Convention, held at the ExxonMobil Campus in Spring, Texas. His award-winning presentation, “Modeling CO₂ Dispersion From Injection Wells and Surface Facilities: Integrating PHAST Simulations and Deep Learning for Enhanced Emergency Response,” highlighted an innovative approach that combines over 6,700 PHAST simulations with machine learning to develop a computer application capable of instantly predicting the Potential Impact Radius (PIR) in the event of a CO₂ leak. This work marks a significant step toward enhancing safety and emergency preparedness in large-scale CCS operations.

Dr. Wang was recently interviewed by The New York Times, about the E.P.A.’s new rules to limit damage from disasters at chemical facilities. The rules require facilities to explicitly address threats such as wildfires or flooding, including those linked to climate change. See the story.

João B. P. Soares, The Canadian Journal of Chemical Engineering (CJCE) Editor-in-Chief, selected “A comparative bibliometric study of the transport risk considerations of liquefied natural gas and liquefied petroleum gas” to appear as one of the featured articles in the Issue Highlights in the June issue.

The article has been selected to be featured in the most recent issue of CIC News, a leading source of information in Canada’s chemical sciences and engineering community. See the story here.

Stanford University has just published an updated list showcasing the world’s top 2% of scientists. Professor Wang has been ranked among the world’s top 2% most-cited scientists in chemical engineering.

Details see October 2023 data-update for “Updated science-wide author databases of standardized citation indicators“

Our paper titled “Thermal Stability of Metal−Organic Frameworks (MOFs): Concept, Determination, and Model Prediction Using Computational Chemistry and Machine Learning” by Harold U. Escobar-Hernandez, Lisa M. Pérez, Pingfan Hu, Fernando A. Soto, Maria I. Papadaki, Hong-Cai Zhou, and Qingsheng Wang which was published in Industrial Engineering & Chemistry Research, April 21, 2022, Vol. 61, pp. 5853−5862 was selected as the South Texas Section — AIChE’s 2022 Best Fundamental Paper Award.

You can access the paper on ACS Publications by following this link: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.iecr.2c00561.

Congratulations to Yufeng  Quan, who has been selected for the AICHE 8A’s Excellence in Graduate Student Research. He will present his research, Efficient and Sustainable Manufacture of Polymeric Composites and Their Applications in Flame Retardancy, at this November’s AICHE national meeting in Orlando!

https://aiche.confex.com/aiche/2023/meetingapp.cgi/Session/52237

The American Industrial Hygiene Association (AIHA) and the American Conference of Governmental Industrial Hygienists (ACGIH) have appointed Dr. Wang as the new associate editors of the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Hygiene. Also known as JOEH, AIHA and ACGIH have jointly published the peer-reviewed journal on the knowledge and practice of occupational and environmental health and safety since 2004.

Full story is published here: https://www.acgih.org/news_articles/6830/.

Congratulations to two PhD students from our group receiving the department fellowship. Well done, Yufeng and Harold! Full Story

Yufeng Quan: Brunner-Barnes Fellowship

Harold Escobar: Jim and Kathy Holste Fellowship