Finding meaning in stable/routine operation

 The course I mentioned last post talked a lot about communicating meaning in terms of concrete objectives, with very clear examples like NASA "we are going to put a man on the moon and bring him back again safely." Now as an engineer I've been more often involved in the design, build, and commissioning side of things, or a distinct process improvement for an existing facility. There's a concrete goal with a definite endpoint.

But what about ongoing operations? There is no endpoint, no time when you can say "congratulations everyone, we have achieved our goal!" or even track steps towards an end goal.

I've seen operational goals set such as producing or treating a certain number of units of whatever the facility does, but I don't find that inspiring... especially when the numbers are or seem arbitrary, and doubly so when the reward for meeting them is a more difficult target next time around.

So maybe considering the value in what the facility does and the value of having that constantly available would be more meaningful. Since I'm completely biased in favour of doing things which protect the environment and public health, I'll start with that category.

Take a sewage treatment plant as an example. Most people don't like thinking about them and like to smell them even less, but they're absolutely crucial to both public and environmental health. People's lives literally depend on them; without, every town above a certain size turns into a festering miasma of waste-transmitted disease. Cholera, for example, was a lot more deadly than people these days realize. This seems like, with accurate communication, some pretty meaningful work, even if it is stinky. I wish the general public would be more aware of just how important sewage treatment actually is, but that's a whole other post.

But how about a facility that produces things in the general category of "non essential stuff" - which really could be anything that exists to make the company owners money, and which they have to advertise to convince people they totally need it, really.

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And this is about where I got hung up on this post, because I don't have a solution and I'm an engineer, I want to have at least a suggestion before I talk about something. So it sat for about a year as a draft, I've long since finished that course, and I don't have an answer to how to make work meaningful when I don't already think it is. Such is life, I guess; lots of people have been thinking about this topic and coming up with lots of blather. I think I'll stop before I add blather, and instead add only: I don't know.

Unnatural or Natural

Something I've been thinking about for a while, even since before I did the greenwashing article series, is: what makes a thing "natural" or "unnatural"?

Many people would say that "natural" things are things which come from nature with minimal processing. It sounds like a reasonable definition at first glance, but when I try to get specific, I start running into trouble with the definitions of the words used to define "natural". They seem to be a bit fuzzy themselves, which makes the term "natural" hard to pin down.

So my first question is, what is meant, exactly, by "from nature"?

Oily algae

Algae, as well as other biologically sourced feed stocks, has been the subject of a lot of research in oil production, for what should be obvious reasons. There are several things about using some bio-sources that concern me, however. Using food cropland to grow corn or soy intended for conversion to fuel, for one, resulting in less food production (and contributing to higher food prices).

The bio-sources that don't bother me in this way are things like manure or other waste to bio-fuel. Even wood waste and scrap paper can be turned into either oil or syngas (which can be turned into oil, among other things).

But, an interesting comment in a recent press release about oil from algae caught my eye: "byproduct stream of material containing phosphorus that can be recycled to grow more algae."

Gold, with or without cyanide

Some things are unavoidably toxic, and some things were unavoidably toxic until a new, less toxic process was discovered. Less toxic is always a good thing. Sometimes it's less expensive in terms of direct costs such as how much the reagents cost, sometimes less expensive in terms of indirect costs, such as safety precautions and environmental protection.

Sodium hydroxide is one such; the old industrial method of making it involved mercury, which is highly toxic. The new industrial method doesn't. (There are still toxic chemicals involved, but they're not mercury.)

One thing that will hopefully one day be added to the past-tense version of unavoidably toxic is gold mining. Currently, if gold can't be panned from a streambed (placer mining) where it's present as pieces of fairly pure gold, it has to be dissolved out of the rocks, often using cyanide. A newly discovered process is being described as possibly displacing the cyanide.

Anti-fizz

While in Europe on a work trip and grabbing a bite for lunch at a café, I grabbed a bottle of water on my way to pay without checking the label. Checking the label is important, because in Europe, "still" water and "sparkling" (carbonated) water are sold side by side—and I can't stand the taste of sparkling water. Halfway through eating lunch, I opened the water bottle to have a drink and it sprayed water all over my tray and my clothes.

I'd grabbed the wrong sort of water. Not only that, I'd obviously shaken it at some point.

Because I'd opened it, I couldn't return it for a bottle of still water, so I decided to de-sparkle the sparkling water, in the hopes that it would improve the taste. Fortunately, this requires no special equipment and can be done in a café, although it might draw some funny looks.

Folded Solar

Solar electrical is pretty exciting right now, I must say. After my previous post on some of the cool stuff coming up in photovoltaics I let it slide for a while and chased other cool news, but this new thing from late December really caught my attention.

I mean, solar panel stickers? Which you can apply to fabric or paper, bend them, and have them still work?

The researchers say that this technique isn't only good for solar panels but also possibly for electronic circuits, transistors, and even LCDs as well. Maybe you really could have a solar powered, electronically active jacket, including flexible display, one day. Imagine, a self-powered jacket that could show you a map of where you are, among other things.

They tested the solar panels to a bend radius of 7mm without any damage. I don't know if it would handle a crease (if on paper) very well, or crumpled-clothes type bends. From the paper, it doesn't look like they tested its bending abilities to failure.

Rotten milk

I ran across an archaeological discovery where cheese-making was confirmed 7,000 years ago.

I'm sure most people know that cheese is an old-fashioned, pre-refrigeration way of preserving milk. It's a pretty interesting preservation method, because it involves a specific kind of bacterial growth—and bacterial growth is usually what's involved in things going bad. I started to wonder: how did people figure out that if you let milk rot in just the right conditions, it doesn't actually rot but turns into cheese?

Which bacteria grow depends a lot on the conditions. With specific nutrients and temperatures, certain bacteria will come to dominate. Sort of like with my home bioreactor, I kept the conditions right for the bacteria I wanted to dominate.

To my surprise, this one turned out to be quite easy, and not as much of a stretch the way chocolate was.

Greenwashing and CBC #3: T-Fal Natura frying pan

Continuing from my previous post with #3 on the CBC Marketplace "Lousy Labels" greenwashing list is T-fal Natura frying pan.

As I mentioned last week, Marketplace is a 22 minute show and they did a 10-product countdown, giving them approximately 2 minutes per product, so they had to leave a lot of information out.

So, the T-Fal website claims for the Natura line that it's made from 100% recycled aluminium and the non-stick coating is PFOA-free, lead-free, and cadmium-free.

Marketplace says that PFOA is still used in the manufacturing process, and that it always has been not present in the final product, and that it likely causes cancer as well as being widespread in the environment. Also they acknowledge that 100% recycled aluminium is a good, environmentally friendly thing.

Greenwashing and CBC #6: Eco Collection bath mitt

Continuing from the previous entry in this series with #6 on the CBC Marketplace "Lousy Labels" greenwashing list is the Eco Collection bath mitt.

As I have mentioned each time, Marketplace is a 22 minute show and they did a 10-product countdown, giving them an average of about 2 minutes per product, so they had to leave a lot of information out. This series is me looking to see what other information is out there.

The Eco Collection bath mitt is, according to the manufacturer's product page, a natural bamboo fiber and natural cotton product. They claim antibacterial properties for the natural bamboo fiber, and that it's made using rayon from bamboo.

Marketplace claims that bamboo can be grown sustainably but requires "funky chemical processing" to make a nice soft fiber, and the product package is unrecyclable vinyl.

This may well be the shortest segment they did of the ten—basically saying the above, then moving on. (I didn't time the segments.)

So, I'm going to look at exactly what's so "funky" about the chemical processing required to turn bamboo fiber into rayon.

Computer researcher

Looks like computers are opening up even more areas of chemistry!

Earlier this year I posted about some software that can predict crystal growth conditions.

Now, there's new software coming out that can predict organic chemistry reactions.

Organic chemistry isn't my field, so unlike the crystal software I probably won't be able to justify a purchase to my boss, but I can still think that this is pretty amazing. The researchers spent a good solid ten years putting the sum total of all organic chemistry knowledge from the past 250 years into a database.

Not only can the computer search possible reaction pathways to make whatever compound you want, you can also filter those results. For example, pathways that use only non-toxic ingredients, or pathways with fewer reaction steps.

In one excellent example, the software came up with what they're calling a "one-pot" reaction for an asthma drug, which is normally produced with four separate reaction and separation steps. The suggested one-pot reaction said that they could put all the ingredients in the same flask in a specific order with specific timing—but with no separation steps, which are often complicated and expensive—and get the asthma drug they wanted—so they tried it.

It worked.

This software sounds like it can lead to the truly ideal case that chemical engineers wish for: faster, cheaper, and safer all at the same time. There are a lot of reactions that use dangerous chemicals, because we don't know of alternate reactions to produce the same thing. Sometimes, research eventually reveals an alternate; for an inorganic example, the production of sodium hydroxide used to involve mercury, which is very toxic even in very small amounts. Now, the mercury process is rarely if ever used, because better and safer processes have been found.

Orange Juice Flavour

I ran across yet another news item about processed food the other day, and decided to find out a bit more about what was behind it.

For those who didn't click the link above: I'm not talking about twinkies, I'm talking about orange juice. Because make no mistake about it, unless you cut and juice oranges yourself, the orange juice you drink is chemically processed. It has to be—fresh squeezed orange juice goes bad on a time scale of a couple of days even with refrigeration. (Apparently you can buy unpasteurized OJ, but it has a "use by" date about 2-3 days after the oranges are juiced at the processing plant. I don't recall seeing it for sale in Canada, which is about a 24-hr drive nonstop from the orange groves... Doesn't mean it isn't here, only that I haven't seen it.)

Solar Technology - The Next Generation

It wasn't so long ago that photovoltaic solar panels were expensive, hard—and dirty!—to produce, inefficient sources of very expensive power.

In the last little while, however, a flurry of advances have improved on all of those problems. So many announcements have come out lately that I've delayed this post repeatedly due to the sheer quantity of new information. But that's not going to stop, so I'll post what I have now, and I may post again later.

For a super-quick summary of first-generation photovoltaic power, the panels were made of silicon using a process that involves toxic chemicals and high temperatures, were very fragile, expensive, and had a low efficiency and limited lifespan.

But now they're becoming cheap, tough, flexible, easy to make, and remarkably efficient and durable.

Crystal habits

I am fascinated by crystals, particularly by their regularity. They basically consist of a unit cell that repeats over and over again, identically, across the whole span of the crystal. And if the crystal is big enough to see with the naked eye, that's a very large number of unit cells.

Very simple crystals, for example table salt (NaCl), have a tiny unit cell consisting of 4 atoms of Na and 4 atoms of Cl, arranged in alternating rows, a structure that is called face-centred cubic, because on each face of the cube, there's an atom in the centre of the same type as the atoms on the corners of the unit cell.

An interesting quirk of the simple 1:1 ratio cubic crystal structure is that you can define either Na or Cl as the corners of your unit cell, and it'll still be face-centred cubic.

Diamond's structure is also simple: every carbon atom has four links to four other carbon atoms, arranged in a tetrahedral shape around it. Because unit cells are defined as cubic or rectangular shapes, however, the diamond unit cell is less simple, even if the structure itself is simple.

Weird water

Water, despite the fact that it's incredibly common, is actually a pretty strange compound. Some of its stranger properties make it particularly useful for life, such as the way it switches from getting denser as it gets colder (normal) to getting less dense as it gets colder (not normal) below 4^oC.

A recently discovered and even more recently characterized weirdness of water is that on the nano scale and on hydrophobic surfaces, water spontaneously flows in instead of being expelled the way one would expect based on the usual reaction of water to hydrophobic materials: (blue in the image below)

Violent separation

In keeping with my original plan for this blog, I am now going to teach myself something new.

Here is something I have known about and occasionally seen since I was a kid, and know the name of, but hadn't seen it in operation and didn't actually know how it worked until I decided to write this post and figure it out:

It works exactly the same way as this thing, which I saw for the first time as an adult:

Recycling water

It may be something we don't like to think about, but one of the things the astronauts have to do while in orbit will be coming more and more to Earth. Fresh water is limited, and getting more so with time. Water conservation helps, but it may not be enough in the future.

Whether they are dependent on well water or surface water, many cities have to worry about having enough water to last through the dry season as the water levels drop. Water restrictions are common in some areas; where I grew up, part of the summer routine was that you couldn't water your lawn whenever you wanted, but only on certain days. Sometimes there was an outright ban on watering lawns if the river level was too low.

At the same time, the volume of water leaving a city's wastewater treatment plant is a substantial part of what the city brought in to start with, and grows with population more than the season.

As wastewater treatment technology improves, the sewage plant's discharge gets cleaner and cleaner, so why not use it as feed for our clean water treatment system?

Platinum and power

One of the classes I took in university was on electrochemistry and fuel cells. It was very interesting, but was also a reality check on the hype of hydrogen fuel cells vs. the reality. One item in particular that stood out for me was that the catalyst required for efficient, low temperature hydrogen fuel cell operation was platinum. While platinum isn't the most expensive metal out there, gold having passed it in price not too long ago, it's way up there. As I recall, the raw platinum required to make a fuel cell cost a significant fraction of the cost of a normal car, and that was before they processed it into a useful catalyst. Since then, they've improved the structure here and there and reduced the amount of platinum required bit by bit, but it's still a lot.

Not long ago, however, some researchers in Finland figured out a way to reduce the amount of platinum by more than half.

Gravitational assumptions

I was working on some fluid flow at work the other day, and while trying to determine whether I could use gravity flow between a series of tanks or whether I had to put a pump in there somewhere, I wondered how a chemical plant built in microgravity would work.

Fluids or solids move because they have potential energy. (Once they're moving they also have kinetic energy.) So what kind of potential energy could, say, a pipe full of water have, if it didn't have gravitational potential and thus couldn't do any kind of gravity flow?

The first thing I thought of was pressure; this is how pumps overcome gravity and lift liquids uphill. Absent gravity, building up pressure at one end of a pipe would push the fluid toward the other, lower pressure end.

The Chocolate Process

Chocolate, as you probably know, comes from cocoa trees, but to get from the tree to edible chocolate takes a fair bit of processing. In short, the cocoa beans are removed from the pod, fermented, dried, roasted and shelled, ground, and sweetened.

I can understand why ancient people paid any attention at all to these seed pods; when you cut through the thick rind, the white pulp the seeds are embedded in is delicious straight off the tree. However, the seeds are pretty bitter and nasty tasting when raw. How did they ever go from "suck on this but don't crack the seed open" to "ferment+dry+roast+grind+sweeten = delicious"?

Nanostamp

Nano-scale devices have been around for a while now, filling functions such as chemical sensors of extraordinary sensitivity and selectivity, your computer's CPU, and the read/write head on the hard drive. There has also been a lot of progress on what people would recognize as nanomachines, too: motors, gears, switches, all on the nano-scale.

In most cases, however, they're still difficult to make, using the same sorts of high-purity, cleanroom processes as for computer CPUs. Yes, those are in mass production as evidenced by how there are computers in everything these days, right down to doorknobs, but it's still an intensive process requiring extreme purity and cleanroom procedures.

Until recently, that is: some nanoscale devices can now be made easily, even with something as crude as a tabletop vise. Plus, the crucial part, a stamp.

The stamp was made using the cleanroom process, and once complete it can stamp out multiple copies of the actual device outside of a cleanroom, which makes them much cheaper and faster to produce.

One thing that is particularly interesting to me as a chemical engineer is how simply changing the coating on the nanostructured surface (for example, a tiny diffraction grating) changes what chemicals it detects (or more specifically, what chemicals stick to it). Then, on shining a light on it, the presence of those stuck chemicals changes the reflection or diffraction pattern in a way that's proportional to the amount of chemical adsorbed. And, moving outside of my field of expertise, biological molecules can be very specific in what will stick together and what will not. There's a lot of work going on to make these sensors to detect specific enzymes or enzyme activity that are characteristic of a disease, antibodies, and even parasites.

Making these sensors faster and cheaper means that development of useful tests for hospitals, and maybe eventually your GP's office, will speed up dramatically.