Industrial Water Processing and Filters - My Understanding in 30 Minutes

Industrial water use is essential for many processes, such as paper, oil and even gasoline production, water may be used to dilute and cool a product, for example. Industries must effectively treat water that they use in order to not only reduce the costs of their processes but also their environmental impact. One way, in recent news, to reduce these costs is advances in the filters that are in place in a certain industrial process.

If there are various particles and waster materials in the water part of the process then the process cannot be fully up to standard or it may even not be able to perform the process correctly, so filters are needed. However, the acidity or alkalinity of a process impacts the wear on filters, which can also cause a problem. The use of metal and polymeric filters is actually not as effective as the use of ceramic materials. The two types of ceramic filters are, Alumina and Silicon Carbide. I always thought of ceramics just as plates and pots! Yet they can also be useful in filtering techniques. Ceramics themselves have many useful properties such as durability, resistance to heat, and inertness. The inertness from my understanding must be one of the properties, which makes it a good material for a filter in industry, as water can sometimes be acidic and alkaline depending on the process, so resistance to corrosion must definitely be a good property. The ceramic filter can also be made to have fine pore sizes to ensure better filtration for the water process.


Sources used:
[1] http://www.engineerlive.com/content/advances-filter-technology-industrial-water-processing
[2]http://www.explainthatstuff.com/ceramics.html

Pilot Plant Strips C02 From Atmosphere - My Understanding in 30 Minutes

A company called Carbon Engineering has made a pilot plant that is able to capture air and turn the carbon dioxide from the air to pure C02. The pure C02  can then be used in other industrial processes, such as making fuel, or it can be stored deep underground (similar to CCS). The technology uses two processes, an air contractor and a regeneration process. From my understanding the process works in the following way:

• The air contractor is powered using an energy source, however even if this energy source produces waste gases, these can also be taken into the overall process to capture the C02
• The air contractor takes in any atmosphere air and produces a solution which is rich in CO2 by capturing it with a special chemical solution
• The C02 reacts with KOH to make a solution of K2C03 which is taken through to a pellet reactor
• The pellet reactor contains Ca(OH)2 which results in a reaction that created solid CaC03 and regenerates the KOH used at first
•  The regeneration process then produces pure C02 and re-makes the original captured chemical
•  There is a continuous capture of C02  

It is expected that the process will be scaled up to industrial use very soon, which is important as the process claims to remove more C02 than any natural process such as through trees or plants. This process could potentially reduce the effects of climate change, which I find very intriguing.


Sources used:
[1]http://www.tcetoday.com/latest%20news/2015/october/new-plant-to-strip-co2-from-atmosphere-opens.aspx#.Vh_8QbRViko
[2]http://carbonengineering.com/air-capture

Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) - My Understanding in 30 Minutes.

Since I’m interested in environmental engineering, I think CCS is a very important topic for me to cover, although I have come across it briefly during my Chemistry A Level.

Carbon Capture and Storage is quite self-explanatory; to capture CO2 emissions from various industrial sites and essentially store the CO2 in geological formations deep underground in order to prevent it from reaching and damaging our atmosphere. CCS uses a chemical plant, but there are also smaller scaled plants for training students such as on CCS pilot plants. The CCS process works with three main steps, capturing the C02, transporting the C02 and finally storing the C02. C02 is captured with either of the following methods, pre-combustion capture, post-combustion capture or oxy-fuel combustion systems. I will my understanding on the method of post-combustion:

• Fuel enters a boiler where it is then combusted with air, this creates steam which can be used to power a turbine, whilst a mixture of the gases of C02, Nitrogen and H20 are taken to a chemical wash
• The C02 is separated from the other gases at the chemical wash, where is is captured, compressed and dehydrated ready for transportation. 
• The C02 can be transported via pipelines or shipment to a suitable underground storage such as old oil and gas fields.
• The C02 is injected into the storage area deep underground where it is then blocked by impermeable rock and thus the C02 is now stored.

My understanding is that after the C02 has been stored it takes the natural process of forming into a useful fossil fuel, although I am not sure over how many years... I imagine many. This is a vital process in order to reduce greenhouse gas emission and put a stop to climate change. However, still in October of 2014 there were only 22 major CCS projects.



Sources used:
[1] http://www.ccsassociation.org/what-is-ccs/
[2] http://ichemeblog.org/2015/05/17/ccs-carbon-capture-and-students-day-355/#more-8668

Commercial Size Plant for Penicillin and Margaret Hutchinson Rousseau - My Understanding in 30 Minutes.

This blog post was inspired by a talk I got to listen to at the Chemistry at Work event, funded by the Royal Institution of Chemistry, in Essex earlier today.

Penicillin was the first ever widely used antibiotic which was discovered by Alexander Fleming, more or less by accident, in 1928. Well I say by accident but he did have to consciously isolate the penicillin first, before he actually discovered it. So, the isolation of penicillin from mould is actually difficult from what I understood at the talk today. And so, the process of actually getting penicillin to be used treat people was originally only done on a small scale that would produce very small amounts, meaning the process had to be repeated many times to get a substantial amount.

Yet in 1944, entered Margaret Hutchinson Rousseau, the first female to receive a PhD in Chemical Engineering (quite amazing actually). She was the chemical engineer who actually came up with a way to scale up the penicillin process to a commercial size plant. She done this by developing a process that involved deep-tank fermentation, which is what allowed this scale up; deep-tank fermenters are used in processes still to this say. It's actually interesting that at secondary school I never got told about the history and specific use of a deep-tank fermenter, yet I definitely remember learning about the different parts it in Biology

Really, the point of this post was to show how, similar to processes like the Haber-Bosch process, there are always chemical engineers, somewhere, scaling up processes that someone has only managed to do on a small scale. More so, it is only today I even got to know of Rousseau and her amazing work. Also, an interesting point to add on the the topic of antibiotics is that apparently antibiotic resistance is a real problem in the world and is the cause of many deaths. Although i definitely knew this problem existed, it is only today I was made aware of how serious it is, and that actually, as a future chemical engineer I could be working on scaling up new processes that involve antibiotics that have no resistance to them yet.  


Sources used:

[1]  http://ichemeblog.org/2015/05/18/ten-chemical-engineers-that-shaped-our-world-day-356/comment-page-2/
[2] http://www.abpischools.org.uk/page/modules/infectiousdiseases_timeline/timeline6.cfm?coSiteNavigation_allTopic=1