For more than 25 years, UH mechanical engineering alumnus Manmohan Kalsi has provided the leadership for his Houston-based engineering consulting firm, and the results have generated numerous innovative products covered by 40 patents, some of which are framed on the wall behind him.

Today Kalsi is the owner of a very successful high technology mechanical engineering firm, founded in 1978 to provide consulting engineering services in research and development, design, analysis and testing of mechanical equipment, seals, valves and downhole drilling equipment. Kalsi Engineering is world-renowned for its consulting expertise in valve technology, especially wherever the demand of safety and reliability is very high, such as in nuclear power plants and petrochemical plants, where the failure of a valve can trigger heavy financial losses or loss of life.

The firm also manufactures and markets a family of very successful rotary shaft seals, Kalsi Seals®, which are used worldwide for harsh applications involving high pressures, abrasives, extreme shock and vibration and frequent stop/starts. Kalsi attributes these unique seal designs, as well as many other technical innovations including a recently developed load responsive hydrodynamic bearing— directly to the excellent education he received at the UH Cullen College of Engineering.

Kalsi, who worked as manager of research and development for WKM Valves before launching his own engineering firm over 25 years ago, personally holds more than 30 patents related to seals, valves and other mechanical equipment. Throughout his career, Kalsi has been successful at analyzing and developing innovative solutions to equipment limitations under the harshest imaginable conditions. Reflecting on his career, Kalsi says some of his most successful innovations are the result of the workings of his intuition, of the “undisciplined” part of his brain that allows him to go beyond rigorous analysis and testing.

Kalsi was born in 1945 in Quetta, Baluchistan, which was, at that time, part of India. Two years later, when India gained independence and Pakistan was created, Kalsi’s family was forced to flee from their hometown. They joined hundreds of thousands in refugee quarters in India, where his father, a civil engineer who had a successful construction firm in Quetta, eventually re-established his business.

This painting is a copy of one of Manmohan Kalsi’s original works, of a landscape of a Black Forrest country road in Germany, which is the homeland of his wife, Marie-Luise Shubert Kalsi, whom he met at UH in 1967 while she was pursuing her master’s degree in philosophy.

He remembers developing a love of art and music at an early age. “Before I went into engineering,” says Kalsi, “artwork was always very, very important to me. At 11, I did sketches, portraits, landscapes with water paints, and then I started to do some oil paintings as a teenager. I liked art just as much as I liked science, especially physics. But for a profession, I figured there’s no way I can really make a living doing art, especially because there were really not many professional opportunities in India for artists.”

Kalsi completed his higher secondary education at regular government schools. At 15, he was accepted to Punjab University in Chandigarh, India, where there was no minimum age restriction.

“I’d always had in my mind the desire to go to the United States to do my graduate studies and research,” Kalsi says, “because the United States was the most advanced country for research.”

After receiving offers from several universities in the U.S. and Canada, Kalsi chose the University of Houston, based upon good advice from Ms. Pfeifer, his international student advisor at UH.

During his pursuit of graduate studies, Kalsi was influenced most by professor Gabriel Fazekas, a Hungarian who was educated in Switzerland and had worked for years in industry in the United Kingdom and in the U.S. before turning to teaching at UH.

“He was an outstanding engineer and teacher due to his experience from having worked in the industry for many years, and it was only after holding several positions as chief engineer at large corporations that he decided to go into teaching,” Kalsi recalls.

It was a bit of Fazekas’ “unfinished business” in research that ultimately sparked Kalsi’s imagination and led to his master’s thesis on rotary shaft seals. Fazekas had explored an idea for a rotary seal in 1957 when he was a chief engineer at American Machine and Foundry, to simply put an O-ring in a slanted groove to create a hydroplaning action, which would bring in the lubricant at the shaftto- seal interface. The conventional O-ring installed in a straight groove has no such hydroplaning action and instead it directly bears down against the shaft, causing high friction and wear.

“In conventional seals, such as an O-ring, if the seal is doing a good job of sealing, it does a very poor job of lubricating the shaft-to-seal interface,” Kalsi says. “But by slanting the O-ring you’re creating a mechanism of wiping the film of oil under the seal—just like when you stomp hard on your brakes and lock your tires on a wet road, you go sliding, or hydroplaning.”

The subtlety of the idea lay in part in the fact that the resulting seal of thin lubricant would never seal perfectly. There would always be a very minute transfer of lubricant across the seal-to-shaft interface, Kalsi explains, but it is enough to cut the friction and wear down to a negligible level.

They tried his idea at American Machine and Foundry, but it didn’t work. Fazekas believed that these original experiments failed because sufficient analytical work had not been done to model the behavior and determine precisely what the design parameters should be before testing a prototype.

“So that’s exactly what I took on as a challenge for part of my master’s thesis,” Kalsi says. “I developed a onedimensional elasto-hydrodynamic model to predict seal performance. From there I determined the slant of the O-ring, the hardness of the rubber, the speed, pressure, temperature, etc.—all of the parameters that would affect the seal performance.”

When Kalsi tested his model with experiments, the difference was immediately clear. “I tested the straight O-ring seal and found that the friction was very high and erratic. Then I tested the slanted O-ring seal and its friction was dramatically lower, more than an order of magnitude less. The performance was very stable, and the slanted seal would operate under much higher pressure and speed combinations.”

Kalsi finished his master’s degree in January 1970 and started to work in industry. He recognized early that this basic rotary seal concept had commercial potential, which is why later, when he started to pursue his Ph.D. while working full-time, his research took this concept a step further. Professors Fazekas and Patrick Hedgecox became his co-advisors.

Just three years after finishing his Ph.D., Kalsi started his own consulting business in 1978. He discovered while working in the drilling industry that rotary shaft sealing in this harsh environment was a tough challenge that had not been successfully addressed by any existing rotary seal technologies.

His first rotary shaft seal patent had to do with combining the slanted O-ring concept with another innovation that was needed to keep the abrasives away from the sealing interface.

“One of the important things that I was able to accomplish, and that was probably because of my artistic side,” Kalsi says, “was to make a jump between how the rotating shaft seal worked and how that concept could be further extended to exclude abrasives. Part of the insight that led to the ultimate design was putting all of the complexity of the previous invention into the rubber seal element, leaving the machining of the metal part as simple as it always had been. That was a conceptual leap.”

“This was the undisciplined jump,” Kalsi says with a smile. “Even though I had not developed two-dimensional theoretical models, I was convinced that the two-dimensional spreading action of the lubricant would lubricate the entire seal-toshaft interface while simultaneously keeping the abrasives away from the interface.”

The result? The very first prototype worked exactly as hoped.

Kalsi Engineering has altogether more than 40 patents, 22 of which pertain to rotating shaft seals. Impressive numbers for a small firm. But that too is by design. Kalsi has always placed a premium on innovation and expertise, not on growing a business in areas where it does not have a technical advantage, or merely for the sake of growing in size.

Manmohan Kalsi (1970 MSME, 1975 PhD ME) supports UH by serving on the dean’s Engineering Leadership Board and with other significant contributions. Pictured with Kalsi (standing) are some of his employees who are also UH graduates: Zach Leutwyler (2002 BSME, 2004 MSME), John Schroeder (1996 BSME, 2005 MIE), Vinod Sharma (1988 MSME), Aaron Richie (2002 BSME), Jeffrey Gobeli (1996 MSPE), Daniel Alvarez (1972 BSMT) and Bahir Eldiwany (1984 PhD ME).

The patents and numerous technical publications represent technical advances and improvements in valves, seals and drilling products. These achievements were possible because of big contributions from a very dedicated staff of brilliant engineers, designers and technicians. Eight of Kalsi’s engineers are graduates of the UH Cullen College of Engineering (pictured on the right).

“Our goal has always been to work on well-defined areas of technology, areas where we add significant innovative value,” Kalsi says. “This is our goal, rather than getting siphoned off into doing other things which others can do equally well, such as manufacturing seals. Our company is always trying to break the barriers to technology. And the choice has been a good one for my team and me. We have very good quality manufacturers and suppliers and we work very closely with them.”

How was he able to keep innovating through the years?

“Our staff here is extremely technically capable, and very sharp,” Kalsi says. “Many members of our staff have contributed toward advancement of technologies that have industry-wide impact. Because of our focus on innovation and an excellent working environment, we are able to keep our talented team together and challenged throughout their careers.”

Aaron Richie (2002 BSME) holds an innovative load-responsive hydrodynamic thrust bearing designed by Kalsi Engineering.

One of the recent innovative tribological achievements of Kalsi Engineering is the load-responsive hydrodynamic bearing, which was developed in part by an award from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Small Business Innovation Research Program. The 8 bearing extends the performance envelope of drill bits and downhole motors and other downhole tools to operate under higher loads and speeds.

“The bearing is a one-piece construction, an idea along the same lines as the hydroplaning principle used in Kalsi Seals®,” Kalsi says. “Under load, the bearing’s dynamic surface, which is initially flat, elastically deflects to a desirable shape that can create hydroplaning. We developed analytical models for the bearing, which showed a remarkably good agreement with the actual test results.”

This one-piece design is significantly more compact, cheaper and more efficient, and it replaces other more complicated multi-piece designs, e.g., tilting pad bearings.

Kalsi Engineering has won several other Small Business Innovation Research awards from the Department of Energy, Department of Defense, Nuclear Regulatory Commission and NASA.

Through his decades of innovation, Kalsi has been a master at striking just the right balance between the aesthetic and the pragmatic. And it’s not by accident. It’s something he strives for.

“To come up with a simple, elegant solution takes a lot more design maturity and a diligent pursuit,” Kalsi notes. “And to me, aesthetics ends up being a very important element of the design. Whenever I look at certain design options, what doesn’t look right probably is not right.”