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Yaw Mensah
Ph.D. Student

Voice:  757-553-2751
Fax:     757-683-5640
Email: ymens001@odu.edu
Room: Kaufman Hall, Room 249

Yaw Mensah is in the class of 2010 PhD program in Engineering Management and System Engineering at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. African is probably the last frontier in economic development. It has a large raw materials base that can be developed commercially but lack technology and capital, as well as management. He hopes to be able to help developing countries such as Ghana to perform credibly in large scale project management.  His research interest is in Project Risk Management in Developing Countries.
He obtained a B.S. degree in Chemical Engineering from University of Kentucky, in Lexington, Kentucky in 1975, and M.S. degree in Chemical Engineering also from University of Kentucky in 1984. Also has MA degree in Economics with advanced knowledge in econometric methods for modeling and business forecasting. 

After B.S. degree in Chemical Engineering, he began his engineering career when he worked for Union Carbide Corporation's Institute plant near Charleston, West Virginia from 1976 till 1982. His work there inspired him to obtain a graduate degree in Chemical Engineering. His research interest was in control systems interaction measure and loop pairing. He applied thermodynamic and fluid flow principles to model distillation column design for multi-component product separation systems. His work in control loop pairing helps improve distillation column design.

He has over 20 years experience working in the Chemical Process Industry. After finishing his graduate studies in Chemical Engineering, he worked for Nalco Chemical Company in Chicago, Illinois, from 1983 to 1991, supporting plant operations for the manufacture of water soluble and latex polymers. His responsibility included systems troubleshooting, developing standard operating procedures and training of technicians and department operators. He was promoted to Senior Research Engineer and was transferred to Research and Development Department, where he successfully scaled up an average of four new products annually.
In 1991, he accepted a position with Hoechst Celanese Corporation as Process Engineer in the superabsorbent division of the corporation at Portsmouth, Virginia. In this position, he developed technical, engineering and manufacturing methods and resource plans to achieve annual production targets, which helped to improve productivity by 2%. As a Process Engineer, he performed system optimization studies to reduce plant downtime where he helped the plans to achieve a daily plant up-time by 5%.

In 1994 the superabsorbent manufacturing plant was acquired by BASF Corporation. He was promoted to Senior Process Engineer. As a Senior Process Engineer, he was responsible for specifying, designing and installation of new equipments. Other achievements were as follows:-

  • He successfully applied organization redesign methods to plant manufacturing equipments to achieve manufacturing plants cost reduction targets. Achieved $1.5 million in plant cost reduction
  • He worked to increase the manufacturing plants reliability and up-time availability of all processes and support equipment reliability by working closely with plant personnel and maintenance team. Plant equipment up time improved by 10% that increased productivity by $1.2 million.
  • He identified and implemented appropriate control systems to ensure all critical processes are under control. Raw material usage efficiency was up 5%.
  • Also, he identified and resolved root causes of non-conformance as well as minimized plant waste generation by 20%, through a new design approach that minimized wetness in product drying conditions.