Work During The War
During the time that Franklin was going to school and began researching, World War II was going on. Franklin had to decide between the traditional work offered for women or a PhD-oriented research job in a field relevant to wartime efforts. She chose the latter, and began working with the British Coal Utilization Research Association (BCURA) in the summer of 1942. She studied the nature of charcoal and and how to use it most efficiently, and published five papers about it. She found out that the pores in coal have fine constrictions at the molecular level, which increase with heat and vary according to the carbon content. These pores act as "molecular sieves", successfully blocking penetration of substances according to molecular size. Franklin was the first to identify and measure these micro-structures, and this fundamental work made it possible to classify coals and predict their performance to a high degree of accuracy. Her work at BCURA yielded a doctoral thesis and the five research papers.
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