Dust-up your act, From Coal to Flour, And All things Small & Beautiful.

First Check out your Material:

Comparitive sizes of airborne particles such as dust, pollen, bacteria, virus and many more have been compiled by Engineeringtoolbox. Industrial examples found are coal, carbohydrates, tobacco smoke and many more. Among the numerous natural substances are pollen, virus and carbohydrates, etc. Why mention carbohydrates? Read-on.

Clean Rooms-High Standards - :
Tough Acts to Meet - particulate standards!

Some Back-ground to Dust Control:[Link]

One small thing leads to another, not just a neurological fact, a synapse.

In fact, I had recently been working on a problem entitled "Dust Control," carbohydrates actually.

However as I delved into the subject, I found that a much more appropriate term, is "dust confinement". The latter, not only satisfies both the difference in interpretation between french and english (anglo-saxon) of the word “control”, but also specifies, in this particular case, the client's aim to increase yield by putting all the material into the product or at least into the packaging.

I had given, myself an excruciating delay, and my industrial past appeared to be catching up with me. "Déja vu".

“Déja Vu!” from metallurgical dust and fumes during my 12years at the local factory here, “Les Acieries d'Imphy”; part of the Euro-Group of special alloys and stainless steel melting and refining plants”, supplemented more recently by car exhaust beneath my window from the local bypass. Now to crown things, a coal reserve found locally, 250MT no less, has come up for exploitation!

Carbohydrate powder confinement?: I had submitted a pretty off-focus (poor) piece of work to a pretty poorly defined question (i.e. one for insider specialists rather than for a general process engineer & scientist) but had the satisfaction of having made a contribution, on time and had learned in the process, although not enough to my liking.

Motivated by calm resolution after the intellectual storm, the brainstorm, to which I had subjected myself, motivated by residual dissatisfaction, by perception, a glimpse of some growing need, like an ominously dark cloud gathering, I set out to put some value on my initial effort to ramp –up, from scratch may I add.

I headed off to the local library, equipped with my hand calculator intending to get some orders of magnitude straightened out: surfaces, volumes, ratios of surface to volume for heat and chemical kinetics; aerodynamic (aerosol) particle terminal velocities etc.

We have the Berkeley 1970's lecture series; mechanics, physics, waves & optics, statistical thermodynamics and quantum mechanics in 5 Volumes, great stuff, and a competitor to Feynman’s famous series. For my purposes, the micron particle range 10-500 microns were to be “confined”. This took me back to my high school and early university mechanics.

In the back of my mind I felt this could also be a useful prelude to the more fashionable nano-family. Laziness or intelligence whichever one prefers, led me to head for the Internet terminal section of the library. Eureka, I was rewarded far beyond my expectations, ashes to ashes; let me share this lucky strike with you:

Micron Particles.

-Volumes, surface areas table, orders of magnitude, Surf./Vol. etc.
:[Link]
-The Aerodynamic particle:[Link] Solved Problems :[Link]
-Terminal Settling Velocity:[Link] Solved Problems :[Link]

Particle Formation:
(Grinding, Fossil-Fuel-Fired Boilers, Municiple and Medical Waste Incinerators):[Link]

Environmental Science Main Reference, more?:[Link]


(Acknowledgement to the US Environment Protection Agency (US-EPA) for the clear simplicity of their contribution to some basics of Environmental Science, thanking them for their continuing interest and wishing them all sucess in their efforts in practice and practise, in essence, Innovation )


((CARBOHYDRATES:I have opened this parenthesis due to my chance (serendipidous) reminder of an interesting link to my previous entry on photosynthesis. Carbohydrates are the main energy source for the human body. Chemically, carbohydrates are organic molecules in which carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen bond together in the ratio: Cx(H2O)y, where x and y are whole numbers that differ depending on the specific carbohydrate to which we are referring.

The chemical metabolism of the sugar glucose is shown below:
C6H12O6 + 6O2 --> 6CO2 + 6H2O + energy
which is the opposite reaction to that of photosynthesis refered to in my previous post. "Photosynthesis is an endothermic reaction very roughly:

6CO2 + 6H20 + energy --> C6H12O6 (glucose) + 6O2

Energy is supplied in daylight from the Sun with the further help of a catalyst, namely, chlorophyll.

Acknowledgement and link is visionlearning )) Close the carbohydrate/photosynthesis parenthesis.