OK, it’s time to poll the thundering masses. If you had to make a choice between subscribing to Beilstein or SciFinder for general access to the chemical literature, which would you take?? Let’s say that you needed to find compounds, articles, procedures, or see what the IP picture looked like. Forget TSCA registry and nomenclature services for purposes of this query.
Obviously, each has strengths. But if you had to take a side, what service would you take and why??
A few of us took the course offered by Scientific Update called Secrets of Batch Process Scale-up. It is a 2 1/2 day whirlwind of slides and class exercises. In my estimation it is a very worthwhile course for process chemists and I certainly got a lot out of it. It is taught by Francis X. McConville who is a gifted teacher as well as experienced process guy. He is the author of “The Pilot Plant Real Book“. Th’ Gaussling is pleased to toot this horn because this class is a great example of how such things should be done.
Most chemists know that the changes that occur in scale-up come in large part from differences in heat transfer and mixing. There are certainly other contributions, but these are the big issues. The parameter that is viewed as most useful in mixing is the mixing energy parameter, Ei, which has units of watts/kg soln. Many of the parameters are subject to large exponents, so one needs to be cautious about how well your intuition works in this non-linear space. The point is, eyeballing the mixing speed in your benchtop apparatus is almost certainly inadequate in comparing conditions in scaleup.
Ei=(Np*N^3*d^5)/V, where Np = impeller power number (contains density and power units), N = rotational speed (1/sec), d = impeller diameter (m), and V = volume (cubic meters). Because the mixing energy varies as the 5th power of the impeller diameter and the cube of the rotation speed, small changes in agitator speed or impeller diameter can result in large changes in power demands on the agitator motor. Obviously, one should be cautious in hand waving comparisons between your 1 liter kettle and that baffled 500 gallon pot in the plant.
The 20.1 MHz radio receiver kit we ordered from Radio Jove arrived last week. Lots of tiny components to solder onto the PC board. I seem to have forgotten the color code for resistors.
The kit comes with conductors and fittings for a dual dipole antenna. I’ll have to go to Home Depot and buy parts for the support structure. The antenna is going to take a bit of real estate to set up. Given that Jupiter is low in the sky for a few years, it is desirable to contrive a means for narrowing the antenna beam to help with some noise rejection. A properly configured dual dipole 15 or 20 ft off the ground helps a bit.
A powerful station already broadcasts at 20 MHz (WWV), out of Ft. Collins, CO, so the receiver is offset at 20.1 MHz. Jupiters cyclotron radio emissions are strongest between 18 and 24 MHz. For locations distant from Ft. Collins, the broadcast at 20 MHz may be irrelevent. The ionosphere is mostly transparent to 20 MHz radiation on the night side of the earth, so transmissions from interfering sources in this band tend to propagate into space at night rather than reflect off the ionosphere and go beyond the horizon.
Th’ Gaussling has been busy studying the basics of antenna theory. It’s quite interesting, really. An antenna is basically a transducer, converting energy from one form into another. The knowledge of antennae is something of a dark art. I have had to scrounge to find resources that explain without too much forgotten calculus.
Once you have antennae on your brain, you begin to notice them everywhere. All sorts of them. Yagi’s, dipoles, dishes, mast antennas, and folded dipoles jutting off of every imaginable high spot. I have one bolted to my house.
The side benefit for yours truly is that it has forced me to have a hard rethink about electromagnetic radiation and the mechanism for its generation. We organikkers generally don’t spend a lot of time thinking about radiation emission and propagation.
There could be some pedagogical advantages to introducing students to electromagnetic radiation in the radio spectrum rather than the visible range. The acceleration of charges in an antenna element and the subsequent perturbation in the charge field around the charged particle seems to be conceptually easier to reach than the usual abstractions showing the 3-D rendering of a sinusoidal wave in most textbooks. In fact, I have never seen a good representation of visible photon emission beyond arrow pushing on an energy diagram. Who knows, maybe a student would learn something about electricity as well?
Hey. Check out the Quantum Slacks by Haggar. The first of their Non-Newtonian line.
If you were to look at me, Th’ Gaussling, as a chemist, you might suppose that the biggest obstacle I or other industrielle Ubermenschen faced in our exalted careers related to the transmutation of matter. Easy conclusion. To civilians who can barely mix Ovaltine in their 2 % milk, making a metric ton of sensitive, high value-added product to specification from dirt and motor oil would seem daunting. And to be sure, it is. But it’s all in a days work. (wink wink, nod nod)
However … (dramatic pause) … chemistry is easy when compared to other issues in the fabulous world of work. The truly challenging part of work is having to deal with difficult people. Overexposure to toxic personalities can cause chronic chafing, distress, or worse.
It is amazing how outrageous some people can be. A while back we interviewed a swaggering gasbag who proved to be 4 or 5 standard deviations from the mean in his cockiness. The word that comes to mind is sphincter. I hadn’t seen this chap in nearly 10 years. But in the first 5 sentences of our brief reunion he had already established his career and organizational superiority. It was only partly in jest. Then to top it off, he declared after 3 minutes of awkward discussion and glances at the watch that he had no more time to talk. No doubt in his absence there would be utter chaos back at work.
Afterwards I stood there in awe of the natural phenomenon I had just witnessed. What do you do with such people? We’re not supposed to shoot them. This fellow is one of those alpha males who consume all of the air when they walk into a room. If he isn’t able to dominate the situation, he just leaves. When he walks in, the room lights up due to all of the sunlight shining out of his arse.
When asked about the hardest group of people to manage, this chemical engineer said without hesitation “Ph.D. Chemists”. He said that he greatly preferred to work with hourly plant people and that Ph.D. chemists tend to pose problems that are more intractable than plant operators. Chemists on salary tend to argue and hourly folk just shrug and do what they are told. Damned right, bucko!!
If you have ever met a company president, you may notice that they are peculiar sorts who seem to be cut from a certain kind of cloth. Those who aspire to such elevated status have to rework themselves from mere management soldiers into an executive. Executives are beings who become organic manifestations of the company. When the CEO of NewCo visits, later you would say that “NewCo was here”. And you’d be right.
It is not enough to be merely competent to be a company executive. Luck, organizational skill, and a bit of ruthlessness are the stars that have to line up to get to the top. Ruthlessness by itself usually isn’t enough.
>>>End Rant Subroutine<<<
Over at A Synthetic Environment you can find an extensive collection of portraits of Friedrich Wohler. It’s pretty cool. For you historians of chemistry, Wohler was a colleague of Justus von Liebig and a student of great Jons Jakob Berzelius. After his inadvertant synthesis of urea in 1828 and subsequent realization of its significance, Wohler reportedly told Berzelius
“I cannot, so to say, hold my chemical water and must tell you that I can make urea without thereby needing to have kidneys, or anyhow, an animal, be it human or dog“.
I do not have a primary reference for this quote, but true or not, it’s a great line.
Iranian progress towards nuclear fuel processing seems to have everyone twittered. Recently on NPR a guest raised the question as to whether or not Iran has enough reactor capacity to consume the potential output of their nascent uranium enrichment program. Good question.
The refinement of fissile materials offers hazards that are poorly understood outside the actinide community. One of them is the “criticality” hazard. In the US nuclear program, there have been a few criticality events leading to heavy radiation dosages and even death in a few cases, i.e., Louis Slotin. Slotin’s case is unusual in that he was manipulating a subcritical bomb assembly rather than a uranium solution. A recent example is the criticality event at Tokai-mura. According to the literature, numerous elements (in addition to beryllium) absorb alpha’s and then emit neutrons.
One wonders if the Iranians have the infrastructure to safely perform this activity. A nuclear state needs a health physics community, sensitive and accurate radiation detection systems, and the ability to handle hazardous radioactive materials that are chemical hazards as well. Then there is the matter of what to do with high level rad waste. The US is still struggling with its rad waste inventory generations after the Manhattan project began. Who knows, maybe NIMBY isn’t an issue in modern Persia.
Nuclear weapons seem so secular for hyperorthodox nations. But these things do capture the fancy of many people- even followers of the worlds major Iron Age religions. Among scientists, the explosive runaway potential was considered not long after it was discovered that nuclear fission released two neutrons per fission. The human brain seems constructed to find extrema.
I wonder how the Iranians will validate their weapon’s design? I assume their program is not an ab initio project. No doubt they have culled design information from somewhere (Pakistan?). Eventually they have to assemble their weapon and tighten the wingnuts on the casing. But how will they know if it has enough thump? Will they be able to resist performing a test shot? Israel, to its credit, has not performed a test of theirs, though I have no doubt that considerable super computer time has been dedicated to validating their design.
How will these sons of Xerxes construct the chain of command for the release of nuclear weapons? What kind of fail-safe mechanisms will they put into place to safeguard against inadvertant or unauthorized arming and detonation? Even martyrs have to be careful.
Nuclear weapons have their military uses, but they are primarily a political amplifier used by states to project their voice on the world stage. But what happens when a religion gets hold of nuclear weapons? Clearly, the Islamic Republic of Iran is interested in more than mere self defense. They seem compelled to promulgate standards and doctrines given to them in the form of revealed truth. A nuclear weapon is as much about prestige and credibility as firepower.
The Iranians are very pragmatic people. They know that the US can easily rain nuclear destruction on them and then bounce the rubble a few times for good measure. They’ll use the bulk of the uranium for electrical power generation. But they’ll be sure to use a part of it for politcal power generation.
I’m having to search far-off China for raw materials much more frequently these days. The availability of many US manufactured chemicals is slowly falling off. Especially for really basic materials. I’m not referring to those mundane elements like iron or soda ash or copper. No no. materials from the folds and deep recesses of the periodic table. Elements with relativistic electrons. There are short term economic pluses and minuses to this migration of manufacturing.
On the plus side, Chinese prices are often, well, quite low. Even with multimodal freight charges from across the Pacific. When you pay peasants fresh off the farm $40/month (or whatever insane wage it is), you can undercut nearly everyone in pricing.
But there is a down side to spot buying from China. This is to be distinguished from contract purchasing. In contract purchasing, you work out an agreement with a manufacturer and you lock in quality, price, and delivery in exchange for long term business. Spot buying, however, is much more risky. What do I mean by that?
Spot buying is where you find a merchant supplier who can furnish material without the fuss and obligations of a contract. Either they have it in inventory, they can source it quickly, or they themselves will make it pronto. A supply contract has to be managed or enforced. For raw materials that are less than critical, finding a spot supplier makes sense.
Locating a spot supplier in China that you can trust is problematic. I’m not suggesting that Chinese suppliers are dishonest. I am saying, however, that culling out a supplier from a list of unfamiliar names from the other side of the world without the benefit of a site visit or a Dunn and Bradstreet report can be risky. Spot buying anywhere is risky, but when it is complicated by international transactions, the risk multiplies a bit.
It is relatively easy to find contacts on the web that will reply to an RFQ (request for quotation) by email (often “hotmail” accounts) and make an offer. But what you find is that you may be in contact with an agent of some description in an office suite in Shanghai, far from the factory. Indeed, it is hard to tell just what the relationship is between the factory and your contact. To salve over some of the uncertainty westerners may have, it is common now for these web contacts take on western names.
Brokering goods is common in some parts of the world and scarce in others. In the USA, brokering chemicals is fairly uncommon. Most US companies prefer to do bulk business with the manufacturer or a catalog house. Sigma Aldrich, for instance, is both a catalog company and a manfacturer of bulk and semi-bulk materials. Purchasing from a broker (as opposed to a distributor) rather than the manufacturer will add costs to the transaction. A broker is someone who connects the purchaser with the supplier. Usually they perform drop shipments to the purchaser directly from the manufacturer. A broker is a sort of “free agent” sales group.
I have found that there is a greater reliance on brokering in Asia and to a lesser extent, the EU. The internet has made life a bit trickier for brokers in that a search for manufacturers is a lot less painful than it used to be.
A company will work through a broker for several reasons. Brokers are usually specialists, so a company can tap into considerable expertise in supply chain management. And, the broker only gets paid if they find a qualifying supplier, so a manufacturer could conceivably keep the head count down. Brokers might be better at the intricacies of negotiation as well. There are a lot of tough guys running companies out there who are actually poor negotiators.
These agents seem to work in organizations that carry on the sales and marketing activity for a factory or a series of factories. In addition to unfamiliar business practices, there is the matter of payment. Many Chinese companies want prepayment- they do not automatically offer 30 days net. This makes company controllers and project managers nervous. Since this is an international transaction, customary business laws covering remedies are not applicable. In other words, you can get royally screwed. But from their perspective, it is the same issue. So settling into a supply relationship can take time.
As everyone knows, the price of gasoline in the USA has been steadily marching up into the low US$3.00 per gallon range to achieve all-time high pricing. Reliable sources state that the price run-up is due to simple shortage of supply. According to testimony from energy analyst Paul Sankey of Deutsche Bank, the US refines 17 million barrels of petroleum per day against a demand of 22 million barrels per day. An interesting analysis can be found at the Oil Drum.
We are in a very precarious position here. An oil shock caused by a catastrophic loss of refining capacity will result in a wild price spike (some estimate US$100/bbl) while gasoline is in the mid $3.00 range already and a major perturbation to the economy- or worse. Unfortunately, we are bogged down in the ill-conceived GW-II, the second of the energy wars.
Th’ Gaussling is still reeling from the news from London that the magnificent tea clipper, the Cutty Sark, has burned. This great wooden vessel was dry-docked in or in the vicinity of Greenwich, England.
Officials connected with the ship stated that “This is a significant blow and a major set back for the ship.” Well, yeah.
Perhaps the ship can be reconstructed and the duplicate put in place. Who knows? What a bummer.
An article by John Richardson in the May 7-13 issue of ICIS Chemical Business reports that China will surpass the United States as the leading emitter of Greenhouse gases by the end of 2007, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). I wasn’t able to trace the actual IEA report down, but perhaps some sleuth out in the blogosphere can find it. More details can be found in this article in the Guardian.
I was amused by this quote in the Scotsman–
In a separate briefing yesterday, Jiang Yu, of China’s foreign ministry, said Beijing was willing to play its part in curbing greenhouse gases from industry, agriculture and vehicles. But she said that wealthy countries bore the blame, and the solution lay in their hands.
“It must be pointed out that climate change has been caused by the long-term historic emissions of developed countries and their high per-capita emissions. Developed countries bear an unshirkable responsibility,” Ms Jiang said, adding they should “lead the way in assuming responsibility for emissions cuts”.
I’d like to suggest to Ms Jiang to ask a few of her countrymen who did their graduate work and post-docs in the USA to pitch in on the problem. China has benefitted in no small way from her citizens taking their education in the USA and helping to generate the very technology that has contributed to our greenhouse gas emissions. The cause of our prodigous CO2 emission is our great facility with converting combustion gas expansion into torque. This torque drives the wheels and generators of civilization.
Chinese citizens have benefitted personally through our university/research complex, their graduate stipends often funded by US tax dollars. The Chinese nation has benefitted collectively with the help of returning students by manufacturing the inventions of the Wright Brothers, Mr Westinghouse, Th. Edison, Philo Farnsworth, Lee De Forest, Edwin Armstrong, Jack Kilby, the Steves Jobs and Wozniak. These are just a few of the Americans. Then there is a whole crop of Germans, Brits, French, Russians, Japanese, Canadians, Dutch, Scandinavians, Swiss, etc. You get the point.
The great engine that drives China’s economic boom is in large part leveraged from technologies developed elsewhere- television, radio, computers, cars, chemistry, medicine, etc. I would say that Chinese society has benefitted significantly from these high consumption, CO2 belching societies that they now point their fingers at.
I’m glad to see China boosting the standard of living and enjoying the benefits of technological society. But, Chinese leaders should shut their pie holes and pitch in to solve the problem. They should remember that the electrical devices and the copper from their smelters afford “high per capita” exports to foreign consumers which helps to sustain our “high per capita emissions”. There are no clean hands in this matter.
Lamentations on Chemistry 