Meet Tishad

tended 2026-10-11

This site answers one question: how a process gets from bench to plant, and what chemical engineering practice becomes when data, models and assistants are ordinary tools.

I am Md Imranul Haque. People call me Tishad, which is the name on the tab. I am a chemical engineer with a PhD, and I spend my working days on pilot plants: the awkward middle scale where a process has left the bench and has not yet earned a commercial plant.

Short bio. Md Imranul Haque (Tishad) is a chemical engineer with a PhD from the University of Wyoming, where he built and ran a continuous flash pyrolysis unit for Powder River Basin coal. He works on pilot-scale process development and scale-up, and on machine learning for the small datasets a pilot campaign produces. He writes at tishad.net about how a process gets from bench to plant and about engineering practice with data, models and AI assistants.

Where the engineering comes from

The PhD is from the University of Wyoming, defended in August 2022, on the continuous flash pyrolysis of Powder River Basin coal: a drop-tube unit I built and rebuilt over six years, with the tar aerosols, clogged valves and burnt-out tubes that come with it. The first project of that degree was the opposite kind of work, a steady-state Aspen Plus flowsheet of a Fischer-Tropsch fluids refinery with nothing measured in it. Between the two I learned what a model is worth and what a measurement costs.

Before Wyoming there was a BSc in chemical engineering and polymer science from Shahjalal University of Science and Technology in Sylhet, Bangladesh, and two early jobs in Chittagong, as a process engineer at a chemical complex and as a QA/QC chemist at a lube oil blending plant. The interest in petroleum, residues and rheology dates from that blending plant.

What I work on

Pilot-scale process development and scale-up. Solvent deasphalting and the upgrading of heavy residues. Coal pyrolysis and coal-derived carbon materials. Asphalt binder chemistry, airblowing and rejuvenation. The control systems that run small plants, from PLC to historian. Steady-state simulation in Aspen Plus, and a Python stack for machine learning on the small, awkward datasets a pilot campaign produces. Lately, a fully local AI workstation and what a working engineer can honestly do with it; the essay on where I stand with AI is the long version.

Follow

The RSS feed carries everything. I am on LinkedIn and GitHub. There is no newsletter yet.

Disclosures

Employment: I lead the engineering of a research group at the Western Research Institute, where I have worked since 2022.

Independence: this site is mine alone. It carries general engineering lessons only, with no data, results or customer information from my employment. Nobody at my employer reviews or directs it. I am not paid to write about anything here, and I pay for my own tools.

AI: drafts are made with an AI assistant from my private journal. I edit and approve every line, and I check every number against its source.

A conflict of interest, where there is one, is stated in the post it touches.

About this site

Essays, short posts on one thing learned (TIL), links with a comment, a garden of notes, reading notes in the Library, and a Resources folder that reads like the directory listings of the WAP sites I built as a student. Everything is written in a private journal first and published from it. The posts are sorted into four categories and five series. The site is built with Astro as plain static files; it sets no cookies and ships almost no script. Nothing on the page moves, by design. Day and night are black and white, and the other themes add a little color. Text and figures are CC BY 4.0.

Published

• Adams et al. (2026). Chemical upcycling method for complete binder replacement from recycled asphalt shingle binder using renewable chemistry. Journal of Cleaner Production, 578, 149261. Open access; I am the last author.
• Haque, M. I., & Bell, D. A. (2017). Continuous flash pyrolysis of Powder River Basin coal. Paper and talk, Pittsburgh Coal Conference.
• Haque, M. I. (2022). Continuous flash pyrolysis of Powder River Basin coal. Doctoral dissertation, University of Wyoming.

Outside the work

A 2023 Toyota Tacoma on the mountain roads of Wyoming. An Ibanez through a small rig, and a vocal practice that is newer than the guitar. Bangla is my first language, and the site is in English.

Contact

Email hello@tishad.net. I read everything; I answer what I can. Corrections are credited on the page they fix.

What he is doing now, tended 2026-10-11.