Robert Buxbaum is a kind, yet innovative author and scientist. This blog is his latest attempt to get his ideas out; both out of him and out to the world. It is also an attempt to get customers for his company, REB Research, a maker of hydrogen separations equipment, and membrane reactor hydrogen generators. I also do consulting, BTW.

Robert Buxbaum got his PhD trying to help develop useful separations technology for the nuclear fusion program. This lead to a PhD thesis at Princeton that he thought was full of important insights about science, engineering, and useful quantum mechanics, but few people read it in its original form. To make matters worse, fusion itself stalled so that no power-producing reactor was ever built, and his (my) hydrogen separations ideas seemed to be lost. Here’s a picture of me with my PhD chums.

Dr. Buxbaum then became a professor of chemical engineering at a midwestern state university (MSU), where he advised students, taught, and produced some 70 technical papers and several patents. More good, new ideas, and more people read the papers than read the thesis, but still little impact as such. So long as Buxbaum was at MSU, no one used the patents or built anything described in the papers. Many of the students went on to do good things, but he noticed that the high-paid ones that seemed to control things were the managers, not the engineers.

Dr. Buxbaum figured business management was ‘the way to go’ and started REB Research so he could be the owner-manager. Here, he patented some more stuff, mostly dealing with hydrogen, but you had to have regular customers for a company to really succeed. So what does he do while waiting for customers? He thinks about his products and his markets, improves his products, tries to make sales, and writes the occasional technical article. Dr. Buxbaum started this blog as a way to publish his essays and ramblings and perhaps interest customers in his products. Generally he writes his blogs in the first person, “I” or “we”, but his page is written the third person in an attempt to appear more objective and truthful. The invention that he is most proud of is a better designed membrane reactor. See here for how and why membrane reactors work. here’s a visit by a local news magazine, and here is some things you might want to do with hydrogen.