Henry Liu

Who was Henry Liu?

Henry Liu was a retired American civil engineer and the president of Freight Pipeline Company, now known as EcologicTech.

Liu earned his PhD in civil engineering from Colorado State University with research on fluid mechanics, and then worked as a professor of civil engineering at University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri for over 20 years. At MU, he was also director of the Capsule Pipeline Research Center, a joint state/industry initiative funded by the National Science Foundation to develop capsule pipeline technology to transport freight; an innovative application of pipelines to transfer solids instead of fluids.

In 2001, after his retirement, Liu founded FPC, the company which developed a new type of fly ash brick, a building brick made from a waste by-product of coal power plants, using an environmentally sustainable manufacturing process.

Liu had spent most of his working career compressing industrial freight using hydraulic presses. In 1999, he was given some fly ash by a client, and decided to compress it "just to see what would come out." Liu mixed the fly ash with water and applied 4,000 psi of pressure. After two weeks, he found that the mixture had set into blocks with the strength of concrete. Owing to the high concentration of calcium oxide in fly ash, the bricks can be described as "self-cementing".