William H. Hartt

The Procter & Gamble Co.

Chemical Engineer

Fellow, Elected 2020

Dr. William Hartt is currently the Technical Section Head for Global Engineering at the Procter & Gamble Company in Cincinnati OH. He completed his PhD under Prof. Don Baird at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech) in 1991. The ongoing focus of Dr. Hartt’s research is in the application of rheology to solve industry problems through integration and automation of rheological measurements, rheological constitutive model selection, parameter estimation, and computational flow models. He has worked over the course of this career to connect academic theory and industrial practice through his own work, which is innovative because of the way that it channels the use of rheology in a fundamental and rigorous way to tackle some of the toughest problems in industry – fast flows, shear banded flows, mixing flows, and process scale-up. He has made use of direct visualization and magnetic resonance imaging methods to demonstrate to processing engineers that shear banding flows occur in common unit operations within P&G. He has also worked on complex time-dependent phenomena associated with coiling and mounding during filling operations with complex fluids, as well as computational fluid dynamics for mixing of complex fluids; the flow of complex fluids in porous media; and multilayer flows of non-Newtonian polymer melts with the 3M company.

Most recently he has focused on integration and automation of rheological measurements, rheological constitutive model selection, parameter estimation, and computational flow models to advance process throughput and drive productivity. In 2019 Hartt and coworkers published an open source python library on Github called ‘rheopy’. This library provides computation of engineering quantities for non-Newtonian flow in pipes and slits, and can even be run from a smartphone or imported into other workflows. He also worked extensively on the rheology of time-evolving and thixotropic systems, addressing the problem at three-scales – firstly at the scale of the time-varying rheology induced by time-varying microstructure, secondly focusing on the complex flows that ensue as a result of the rheological complexity, and the thirdly through the use of state-of-the-art computational modeling that allows the rheology-flow interactions to be scaled up for processing flows. This work is a tour-de-force demonstration of how recognition of the fundamental role of rheology can impact an industrial problem from lab to plant scales.

He is the holder of several patents in the area of mixing of complex fluids as well as a member of the North American Mixing Forum, AIChE and IEEE Computer Engineering division. He is very active in The Society of Rheology, co-chairing the popular AIP/SOR Industry Outreach forum, serving on the Bingham Committee as well as chairing the 2020 Metzner Award Committee.