Dr Harold Walmsley CV
Education:
- 1968- 1971: 1st degree: Oxford University, BA Natural Sciences (Physics)
- 1971-1974: University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST), PhD in Plasma Physics, “Langmuir probes in flowing plasmas”
Employment:
- 1974 – 1978: Liverpool University Electrical Engineering Department,. Research Assistant working on the thermal and electrical behaviour of high current circuit breaker arcs.
- 1978 – 2009: Shell Research Ltd/Shell Global Solutions. Scientist, Senior scientist and Consultant. Principal areas of responsibility at different times have included static electricity hazards, hydrocarbon emission measurement, modeling hydrocarbon fuel properties and modeling internal combustion engine performance.
- 2009 – : On retirement from Shell set up Harold Walmsley Electrostatics Ltd in order to continue to continue to make use of his knowledge and experience of electrostatic hazards.
Experience in electrostatics:
Topics in electrostatics for which I had direct responsibility whilst working at Shell include: investigating charge generation processes in liquids, general hazard assessment, incident analysis, laboratory measurements, field trials, mathematical modeling of electrostatic processes and the writing of guidelines and standards. I have published many reports and papers on electrostatic safety (see reference list) and became the main Shell expert on electrostatic safety. I have been the principal author of several sets of static electricity guidelines including Shell’s main internal static electricity safety guidelines and their guidelines for controlling electrostatic issues in terminal operations. The main Shell Guidelines were published externally as a whole issue of the Journal of Electrostatics (Journal of Electrostatics vol 27, nos 1&2) and were used heavily in the development of the liquid handling sections of the initial version of the CENELEC static electricity guidelines (TR50404).
I have been a member of several committees and working groups involved in developing and updating static electricity guidelines for industry organisations (EuroPIA, Institute of Petroleum, now the Energy Institute), national standards organisations (BSI) and international standards organisations (CENELEC, IEC). I also advised the SAE on static electricity standards for motor vehicles. I am currently a member of BSI and IEC working groups. I have previously been invited to comment on the standards produced by other organisations including API, ASTM and IMO (ISGOTT). I have published numerous papers on static electricity in academic and technical journals one of which won an Institute of Petroleum prize.
Other experience:
At Shell, I worked on many topics outside static electricity. These include the measurement of industrial hydrocarbon emissions by Differential Absorption LIDAR (DIAL) and the modeling of hydrocarbon fuel properties and internal combustion engine performance. The fuel property modeling proved to be a particularly useful complement to his work on static electricity as it gave many useful insights into the evaporative behaviour of petroleum products and the formation of flammable atmospheres.