Category Archives: Chemical Industry

Hooray for Libraries!

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Over the past few months I have been trying to accumulate synthetic procedures for simple compounds of several elements. F-block elements whose chemistries are comparatively obscure at best. I have scoured the web with all sorts of search term combinations, looking for content that may be available. Except for links to major publishers wanting to sell me article downloads for $30 to $45 each, that faucet was dry.

SciFinder was surprisingly dry as well.  Journal articles appeared touting some obscure p-chem work or Raman IR study. Interesting work to be sure, but the bibliographies were absent the key words I was looking for. Complicating matters, many of the early SciFinder listings were from Russian or Chinese publications that were in the native language and available through interlibrary photocopying. It was clear that SciFinder would only be of help if I wanted to open up a big vein for a major cash bleed by purchasing articles blindly.

So, I left work early and went to a nearby university library for some swimming in the deeper waters of knowledge. Within 2 hours I found much of the information I was looking for, and through the miracle of browsing, I blundered into a rich vein of information I probably wouldn’t of thought to have asked for.

If you ask for help in a library, you’ll often get the question: “What are you looking for?” It is a fair question. A librarian is there to help patrons find information. But, very often, a seeker of knowledge sets out with a poor idea of exactly what the best questions are. Some are searching for facts while others search for concepts. It is only by culling through a body of knowledge that one can begin to frame questions that make sense. The best questions give the best answers. Perhaps the librarian should ask if the patron actually knows what they want and drill in from there.

The pursuit of knowledge is not like going to the pharmacy and pulling a prepackaged unit off the shelf. The pursuit of knowledge puts you squarely in front of a problem where the actual struggle begins. Learning is about integrating concepts into your consciousness, and that involves struggle.  If you are not willing to struggle with an idea, then you’re not really committed to learn something new.

Too often we go to the library to get answers when instead we should be seeking better questions. I was seeking facts but instead found that my assumptions concerning how certain reactions proceeded was fundamentally in error. I have had to recalibrate my expectations as a result.

Epilog: So, I did my seeking and found some books to check out. At the circulation desk the nice young lady told me that they had no record of me and that I would have to plop down a $75 fee to check books out from the state university library.  Luckily I was able to shut my mouth and walk away to fulminate in private.

Laser Light Show

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While scanning a copy of Nuts & Volts, I happened on an ad by Ramsey Electronics. This ad featured several electronics kits, one of which was the Laser Lght Show, # LLS1.  I ordered a kit and assembled the thing in about 6 hours. 

Basically, an optical path is set up wherein a laser beam reflects off of two variable speed motors with mirrors and a speaker with a mirror to provide a sound modulated Lissajous pattern. Lissajous (Wikipedia) patterns are an exercise in signal mixing.  Off-axis sinusoidal waves can be mixed electronically (see link) or optically as with this kit.  The kit has a jack to feed audio to the speaker. I have not had a chance to feed in audio just yet- need to open up a cheapo radio and do some minor surgery.

It is satisfying to build things now and then. This activity stems from to my basic belief that one can never know too much about electronics. And, it’s fun.

Putting a Blog to Work in Project Management

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There is an interesting PPT download from the archives of the 231st ACS national meeting concerning the use of the weblog format in project management. The presentation was by Randy Reichardt, an engineering librarian at the University of Alberta, Edmonton. The university offers what they call uSpace as an in-house blogging venue for its students. uSpace is a university service under Elgg, an open source blogging platform.

The slide show summarizes a project executed by an engineering class.  Communication between participants centered on the use of a blog. The blog was a kind of nexus used to centralize information related to the project as well as provide an archive to capture events and progress in the project.

Slide #8 has some useful advice issued by the professor-

3. Check your personal issues at the door. This means personal problems, prejudices, wierd/offensive senses of humor, tears (in general, men find this very threatening and difficult to deal with), and aggression (in general, women find this very threatening and difficult to deal with).  It is never a good idea to (cry, lose your temper, or backstab) at work. DO bring a sense of fun, a sense of humor, enthusiasm for the project, and commitment to your team members as human beings. Great teams remember to play together as well as working hard together.

4. Figure out what you’re good at – and do it.

Use of a blog as a central repository of information and connectivity is a brilliant idea.   The only snag I can think of is access. For college coursework a medium level of security is satisfactory, but for the exchange of IP and confidential information, storing sensitive information on an off-site data storage system may not be the best option.  Access must be secure from unauthorized outside parties.  Perhaps Elgg offers this capability? [Editors note: a commentor below suggests this is not an issue]

Reichardt mentions other topics of great importance in the PPT show.  Namely, access to database features and the transfer of information via RSS feeds. I’m not fluent in this technology, so I will have to be silent on this matter. 

The beauty of this approach to project management is that meetings can be held on a continuous or ad-hoc basis without having to schedule interruptive and unproductive meetings where much time and energy is spent presenting updates. People tend to be more precise in their comments if they write them down. Writing in a blog format could have the benefit of more cogent and precise input by team members as well as increased accountability to the group.

THF Under EPA Scrutiny

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According to the August 27, 2007 issue of C&EN, page 29, the EPA says that the toxicology data on tetrahydrofuran show “suggestive evidence of carcinogenic potential”. The cited document can be found at this link.

It’ll be interesting to see what happens as a result of this study.  It is understatement to say that THF is a mighty important solvent. More than a few important processes require this cyclic ether.  Perhaps this is how Methyl THF makes its appearance to a wider audience?  But in doing so it will only attract the attention of toxicologists.

With REACH and the EPA’s reexamination of many substances in current use, there is likely to be an extended shakeup coming for US chemical processors in the next 5-10 years.  What the rest of us have to reconsider is what constitutes acceptable risk. It’s time for that old aphorism- “A ship in harbor is safe. But that is not where ships are meant to be.”

The hardest problems to deal with seem to be the low signal-to-noise ratio phenomena- low level radiation, low level pollution,  trace levels of this or that in the working environment.  Most likely, acceptable THF exposure levels will come way down and the material will stay in use. That’s my guess.

Disconnects Between Chemistry and Space Science

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I continue to marvel at how isolated chemistry is from non-chemists.  Not in the physical sense, but as a cultural disconnect.  Case in point: Our local high school principal wants to make the high school a “magnet” school for math, physics, and engineering. What about chemistry? It seems doubtful that he considered chemistry and purposely left it out. More likely, it is not on his radar screen.

In the course of operating the local astronomical observatory, we volunteers have the opportunity to interact with the public and with aerospace people and some local space science organizations.  The Boulder-Denver area has an unusual concentration of astronomy, physics, and aerospace engineering organizations. 

A very large part of space exploration is concerned with building probes, getting them in space, and acquiring the data. Behind every mission is an army of space system specialists, scientists, post-docs, accountants, project managers, and a collection of congressional supporters.  Maintaining a space exploration program requires extensive infrastructure and a healthy flow of cash. 

Despite this massive effort at the exploration of our solar system, what is notably absent is the larger participation of chemists.  Television programming aimed at mass markets rarely gives more that a passing mention to chemical composition of the cosmos. Chemists are never interviewed in this regard, nor are their books on the shelves of bookstores.

How strange. 

Ostensibly, our interest in the universe resolves to a few basic questions:  How big is the universe? How much stuff is out there? What is the stuff doing? And, what is the stuff, anyway?

A large part of the first question- How big is the universe?– must necessarily must come to grips with the distribution of matter in the universe.  The second question- How much stuff is out there?– requires an understanding of cosmic abundances of the elements and how mass funnels into certain buckets in the periodic table. The third question- What is the stuff doing?– requires an understanding of how matter is partitioned between the stars and the spaces between. It also requires that we have an idea of what kind of chemical compositions are out there because that determines how we quantitate the matter. Finally, the last question- What is the stuff, anyway?–  Golly, isn’t that just chemistry?

I do not mean to imply that nothing is being done in regard to chemical questions in space science. Considerable effort is being made to perform chemical analysis on a couple of Mars landers and work has been accomplished therein.  The Tempel 1 impactor experiment performed recently is another good example.

This essay isn’t meant to highlight deficiencies in space science.  Space science people are pretty busy trying to keep the process steaming along.  But I think that chemists as a group have perhaps been less than anxious to address cosmochemical questions. Part of it has to do with the space science establishment. Space science is dominated by government funding and is managed to a large extent by engineers, physicists, and aerospace management. Putting a package into space is largely a physics and aerospace exercise that exploits defense related technology. Propellant people and materials science people are involved, but they do not manage the projects and the cash.

Nobody thinks about strapping chemists to a rocket and sending them into space, though I know few chemists I would like to send into space. Space exploration thus far has been an aerospace adventure and the science packages have been largely physics-oriented. The chemical community has little experience as a whole in participation in space missions. So, the disconnect is an artifact of how space exploration evolved.

My point is that in the education of chemists, there should be a bit more exposure to nuclear and geochemistries.  The present emphasis on life science supports the allied health field very well, but perhaps at the expense of other areas of chemical science.  It all boils down to the funding and training of professors and the consequent development of curriculum. Professors teach what they know. If they do not know cosmochemistry, geochemistry, or nuclear chemistry, it won’t get taught.

[Edited for content 9/2/07]

The Ethanolic Dark Age. 27 CFR Part 19. Distilled Spirits.

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Should there be any lingering doubt about our Puritanical Heritage, all a person has to do is to scan 27 CFR, parts 1-31 to view our statutory fretting about ethanol. This is the code that covers the production and sale of alcohol.  Part 19 is particularly interesting since it pertains to distilled spirit production and the documentation requirements therein. 

It is a funny thing. The more regulation that I come into contact with, the more libertarian I become.  Righteous persons might say that gangsterism that arose over liquor in the prohibition days clearly demonstrates how an underground laissez faire production and distribution economy can arise under poor enforcement conditions.  I would counter that gangster control of liquor arose quite naturally from the substantial profits from high demand for forbidden intoxicants. It is in the nature of puritans to deny access to natural urges.

One of the unfortunate consequences of this requlatory fixation on ethanol (EtOH) is evident in chemical processing.  Purified EtOH is highly taxed and regulated with licensure requirements. Denatured EtOH is available, but is contaminated with additives that may be deleterious to the reaction conditions or could leave undesirable residues.  The result is that manufacturers use methanol in place of EtOH. Methanol is inexpensive and is unregulated for coolant, solvent, or reagent use, but it does have the downside of being more toxic than EtOH. 

The result is that process chemists may engineer around the need for ethanol in favor of methanol. Absolute or 95 % ethanol for processing carries the penalty of added documentation and expense that few have an interest in. In effect, because of regulations and taxes, chemical workers are exposed to methanol rather than the less toxic ethanol.  Using ethanol vs hydrocarbon-derived alcohols carries a benefit of being faintly greener owing to the renewability of ethanol.

Speaking of intoxicants, at a recent street festival I happened to try a New Belgium brand of beer called Mothership Wit.  As I tipped it back, the FortJazz band was belting out a brassy Zoot Suit Boogie. It was dusk, 75 degrees, still air, under a cloudless sky.  Ordinarily I’m not a big fan of wheat beers.  But this had a fruity finish that was remniscent of juicy fruit gum. The orange peel and the coriander somehow conspire to produce this subtle effect.  I rather enjoyed the Mothership Wit and the music. It was a grand time.

Wake up chemists! The DHS is on the Case.

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While American chemists have been busy going about their lives, making and analyzing molecules, the legislative and executive branches of the government have also been busy making things more complex for the chemical industry. Procedures, protocols, rules, guidelines, and consequences for inaction have been drawn up for our “safety” by the Department of Homeland Security, DHS. Even the American Chemistry Council (ACC) has bought into the changes.

I remember as an adolescent boy in the 70’s daydreaming with friends about how much trouble we could cause society.  We would scheme about how easy it would be to crash the power grid or interefere with traffic or a hundred other things that would amuse idle teenagers.  These were mischievious thought experiments that we would titter about, but would have never actually done.  Some fellows discovered marshal arts and others developed a fascination with weapons and personal protection. 

For a few of these fellows, the teenage obsession with weapons and security has grown into an adult paranoid lifestyle whose world view features a threat environment squirming with risks. To be sure, there are risks. But the 9/11 attack and chronic Islamic terrorism have stimulated the fight or flight bundle of neurons in the brainstem and they are firing alert signals everywhere.  It is worth noting that some of this threat is push-back stimulated by a century of unintelligent foreign policy by petroleum importing states.

Some of these righteous-yet-paranoid youth have grown up and gone into government.  The politics of fear mongering is everywhere. Security at all costs. Monitor telecommunications. Control everything. Worry about everything.  Restrictions on liberty are always justified because we are trying to protect liberty. We’re the good guys, right?

<<< Sigh >>>

One of the most intellectually challenging things for humans to do is to quantitate and plan for risk. Few people walking around on earth have a true grip on what probability really means, and only a few of those folks have an idea of how to devise plans based on it. Good data is scarce so planners have to make assumptions.  Most people, when faced with a perceived risk, will assume and plan for the worst. It seems defensible.  After all, isn’t the satisfaction of the complete excision of risk worth any price?

A more mature and nuanced view must balance risk with the cost to liberty and make choices about what kinds of failures are acceptable. But this is the choke point. It is difficult to come to agreement on acceptable risk in a democracy because votes have no logic test. For the chemical industry, it would appear that choices are being made for us by someone else.  Chemical incidents have a fair likelihood of exiting the perimeter of a plant, so the authorities naturally become involved. This is not unreasonable.

What is unreasonable in my view is the newly enacted statutory control of useful or even critical industrial substances.  The military considers chemical weapons to be largely ineffective owing to the point source nature of the release and unpredictable factors such as wind direction and speed. Somehow we’re worked ourselves into a lather over imagined improvised terrorist chemical calamities at US manufacturing facilities. 

US chemical industry should audit for weaknesses in security. But the path we’re on with the security state imposition of controls on materials is a bad trend and is likely to harm an industry that is already in a precarious competitive position.

[Disclaimer: Opinions expressed here are solely those of this writer and do not represent opinions and policies of any organization the writer may be associated with.]

On Importing Chemicals

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Th’ Gaussling has previously written on issues related to doing business with China.  The business climate in China resembles a gold rush in some ways. It is a Chinese Klondike bursting with optimism and strutting confidence.  Rather than streams full of gold nuggets, however, China’s hinterlands provide a bountiful stream of entry-level labor anxious for a chance for the good life in the city.

But just like other gold rush periods, a very few strike a rich vein, a larger minority make their fortunes on the miners, and the majority making up the big bulge in the bell curve labor like mules to energize production. Inevitably, some move from rural poor to urban poor. 

You can feel the glow of optimism radiating from the Asian land mass when you go shopping for products on the internet or at trade shows.  Entering a CASRN into Google will often bring back a collection of sites, often enough one in particular comes up first.  Chemexper is a site that presents a large list of suppliers for many compounds. However, the list is notably lacking in US suppliers, favoring those in Europe and Asia.  When sourcing non-commodity, specialty chemicals it is useful to have foreign supplier resources handy.

I’m not biased to foreign suppliers. I am admittedly biased toward US suppliers. However, sometimes entry to a piece of business requires rock bottom raw mat pricing, even in the specialty chemical market. You have to do what you have to do.  But to help maintain a strong US manufacturing base, US companies individually have to be competitive and strong.  If the US has trouble competing on the raw materials end, then it has no choice but to excel on the back end of the chain where the final assembly occurs.  It is not uncommon for specialty chemical companies to source outside the US to find bulk raw mats that domestic suppliers don’t want to offer at less-than-railcar levels.

We’re all familiar with Aldrich, Alfa Aesar, GFS, Strem, etc.  Sometimes you can justify going to a catalog company for bulk raw material or reagent.  But very often in scale-up the economics favor direct supply from the manufacturer.  While R&D level sourcing can almost always be done from US vendors, bulk supply is increasingly an international game [remember, Th’ Gaussling refers to the specialty chemical market]. International sourcing is an acquired skill.

Importers of chemicals must be wary of many pitfalls awaiting them. There are regulatory concerns and among them  TSCA is a big one.  Before you import a chemical, be sure to understand the TSCA ramifications.  However, TSCA is just the tip of the iceberg.

It pays to seek general business advice on this kind of activity.  If one has designs on a long term supply relationship, there is no substitute for a visit to the suppliers facility.  Reputable foreign manufacturers are there for the long term business and want a relationship with their customers. 

Google McGoogle

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I cannot account for why I never looked previously, but there are web resources that explain how Google does its job and how to make better use of it.  Doh!!  Even if you aren’t involved in marketing and have nothing to sell, it makes sense to have a better knowledge of how this system works.

If you are involved in selling things, eventually you have to turn to the internet and view your ranking on the various search engines.  Google uses some kind of black magic to rank websites.  While the details may be proprietary, many of the general principles are out in the open. One of the criteria is the extent of interconnectedness the site has with other sites.  Sites that are linked to by many other sites will be ranked higher than those with fewer links, all else being the same. Clues to the ranking mechanisms are revealed in the Google patent appln link here. 

Th’ Gaussling is not so bored with life yet that this patent appln is high on the reading list. But digital savants and code monkeys out there may dig reading this stuff.

Markush Claim Reform

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The USPTO is proposing changes in the rules related to the practice of writing “Markush” claims. Markush claims are used heavily in chemical patent applications and allow applicants to claim vast arrays of chemical species by way of composition of matter or by association with a claimed process. The Markush claim makes use of generic formulae that represent the substance of interest as well as a class of equivalent entities.  It is not difficult to specify features of a simple formula that claim many hundreds or thousands of chemical species. 

The PTO admits that it is overwhelmed with the workload associated with these large collections of substances.  I have no doubt that this is true. Patent prosecution requires a search of the prior art for the novelty requirement. A Markush space filled with a large number of compounds slows down the workflow.  

I would hope that the congress and the PTO consider the cost to the public in performing due diligence as well.  I wonder if our cheminformatics friends can find a way to map the space defined by a Markush claim. This would make a due diligence exercise more cost effective and reliable.