Raymond C. Grills is an American physical chemist who worked at the University of Chicago’s Metallurgical Laboratory and at Hanford during the Manhattan Project.
After receiving a B.S. in Chemistry from Monmouth College in Illinois and a Ph.D. from the University of Indiana, Grills was hired by the DuPont Company. He worked for DuPont on nylon research and on explosives before joining the Manhattan Project as a metallurgist. At the Chicago Met Lab and at Hanford, Grills and his colleagues developed a canning process to seal uranium slugs for use in Hanford’s water-cooled nuclear reactors.
After his canning technique was successfully implemented, Grills was transferred to a DuPont nylon plant in Martinsville, Virginia. He continued working for DuPont after the war.