Maney Publisher for the Institute of Materials Minerals and Mining

I have just reviewed Maneys extended collection of Material Science Series[Link] ; Materials, Energy, Environment ... As a professional, I found the collection of great interest and warmly recommend browsing[Link] by Chemists,Absorption Chemists,Physicists,Materials Scientists,Metallurgists, Ceramisists,Applied Earth Sci,Chemical Engineers,Extractive and Process Metallurgists,Fuel Technologists, Surface Engineering, etc... to visit this collection and check whether they have, through their respective institutions and professional association access to online material, and free trial subscriptions as I have with great pleasure and benefit.

No_Holds_BARD "wedges wars"

As in the previous weblog, I am trying to make up for some lost time.

Straight to the point,here, I wish to lay a claim to the above title, "No_Holds_BARD."[Link]

The reader will by now, if he has taken the time to browse at some length, realise the auther's predisposition for prose and when inspired for poetry, the authers taste for originality, the exceptional,the extraordinary, perhaps, as an anti-dote for the run-of-the mill, the mundane...

However, here I must acknowledge (& log) that the title arose on a chance encouter on the RER_Rail Express Reseau the Paris High Speed Rail, between the Paris West beautiful town of St. Germain-en-Laye and Place Charles de Gaulle-Etoile.

Sitting opposite my wife and I was a compatriot, in full Scottish traditional dress, kilt, jacket,stockings-hose, the whole bit! Not only was Archie Robertson, from my native Scotland, he hails from my own home county's main town, Ayr, the county being named Ayrshire. It is now part of the Strathclyde region which includes the City of Glasgow. We, Archie & I, were neighbours, distant only of some 15kms appart.

I mentioned that I had two or three websites, blogs or personal pages in which he may enjoy my translation to french of the Scots poet Hugh Macdiarmid (ref in earlier logs, archives..) and maybe even find it of use in his english classes at the School of Commerce in St. Germain-en-Laye, adding "please feel free, just mention me as either the translator (Macdiarmid) and the auther of some original science based poems, and use them as you wish, No holds barred". In the true Scottish tradition, the quip came fast, "No Holds Bard",
[Link P3.],[Link P4.],[Link P5.], [Link P6.],[Link P7.] ,[Link P8.]

and he waited a second or two (I was a bit slow) to allow me to pick up the play on words - "le jeu de mots", same sound different meaning! I took this as an undeserved compliment since he had not yet read my efforts. I trust he (and any chance reader) has read them by now and appreciates them.

Footnote:
The Church in St.Germain-en-Laye, West Paris,just opposite the Castle, is host to the remains of the Scot, King James VI (of Scotland) & I (of Great Britain, UK) and incidently the rather posh town of Ayr in Scotland is twinned with equally posh town, Saint Germain-en-Laye,in France.

Belated Acknowledgement to Virginia Tech (vt) Pilar of Doctoral Thesis Repositaries

In guise of heart felt sympathy for the victims in the still recent killings at Virginia Tech (VT); staff and students, but also extended to the survivors, fellow students,victims families, relatives and friends, for the disgrace no doubt felt by the innocent members of the killers family, I wish to write a few lines of of appreciation for the work of the Tech.

I learned to truely apppreciate VT. through their support for the Masters and Doctoral Thesis Repository, to my knowledge the first freely available public online Doctoral Thesis Library.[Link] What better tribute to humanity, the availability of high level useful science and technology.

I am pleased to add that their example has been joined by many of the most important Schools and Universities in the USA, Doctoral Thesis Library (FR).[Link_1] Pastel:Paris Institute of Technology_Doctoral Thesis Library (FR)_[Link_2]
NB. I support movements, in modern democracies, whose aims are the strict, tight control and eventually full abolishion of small hand arms often more accureately descibed as "weapons of war")

Serendipity & Great Inventions Myths Mistakes & Creative Error

The subject of the myths in science together with the importance of trans-, cross- or interdisciplinarity in scientific invention and innovation ("the latter being a sort of assisted serendipity") was recently brought to my attention, again, by a french friend, "James Clark". No, no, you are reading me correctly, James Clark is french.

The recent obituary, in The Economist, of Nobel Prize winner: Paul Lauterbur, father of MRI, who died on March 27th, at the fairly early age of 77, illustrates these themes rather well and how even the best, Macmillan press of Scots origin, can make mistakes, by refusing Paul's first paper in on Nuclear Magnetic Resonance(NMR)-Imagery in 1971. Perhaps this hurdle in 1971 spured Paul to even greater heights, from a near bust company started in 1971 to a shared Nobel Prize in Medicine 2003?


"THE whole history of modern science, Paul Lauterbur once joked, might be written on the basis of papers turned down by academic journals. His own experience was a case in point. In 1971 he sent a paper to Nature; it was rejected. The Nature folk were especially unimpressed by the fuzziness of the pictures that accompanied the piece."
ref. The Economist, UK. [Link]

To add a little more colour to this somewhat sad post,here is a lively, witty poem I like, by Norma Bruce refering to Research & Serendipity and more, entitled "The night Research went on a joy ride"[Link]

Wedge-A-War: Any Old Iron?, Corrosion & Natures Processes

Fe(s)+ H2O(l) +CO2(g)=> FeCO3(s) +H2(g)
iron +water+carbon dioxide => iron carbonate + H2
(where s=solid, l=liquid, g=gas.)

Let the Heavenly Steel Chorus hear -
Metallurgists, Steelmakers, Geologists, dear
Chemical Engineers and Ecologist's plea.
From humble steelmaking, sometime war-mongering,
To white knight planet saviour - eco-engineering,
For "Now's the time and now's the hour" for CO2 sinking,
For scientific method and controlled tinkering.
The above corrosive reaction begs the question:
Any old iron?

[Link to poems & more ]

References to CO2 Corrosion and Hydrogen Production:
1. Corrosion Mechanisms and Control in Hydrocarbon Exploration and Production Operations, D. Kirkwood, Journal of the Metallurgical Club N° 27 1992-1993,The University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, Scotland.
2. NIMS-National Institute for Materials Science,Japan.[Link]

Full report on environmentally benign engineering [Link] (3.5Mo format Pdf .

3. Why not use iron? .[Link]format pdf

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.

Photosynthesis - The Endothermic PhysChem Reaction-In Reality "A System - Nature at her Best". (Wedge a War on Deforestation)

I have been very busy addressing various scientific and technical challenges, surprisingly, corresponding badly with the Xmas & New Year festive season, hence my lack of entries since 31 0ct.06!

Back "on the Air", I have chosen to share my introduction to a challenge which I found in the field of endothermic chemical reactions. These are reactions which absorb heat as opposed to releasing heat. As I found, it is a highly topical and even more so a highly relevant tropical theme!

Introduction:

Firstly I wish to thank Innocentive for drawing my attention, anew, to the field of Endothermic Chemical Reactions. A rapid search reminds the chance solver of the global importance of such reactions, especially under the current climate findings, in the form of Photosynthesis. I would have enjoyed delving further into this common but highly complex issue. For memory photosynthesis is an endothermic reaction very roughly:

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

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

Unfortunately it became rapidly apparent that I could not within the current challenge remotely hope to use this as a realisable solution.

I put the idea aside, for future reference.

The year 2006 ended with the publishing of the highly acclaimed Stern Report on the economics and financial implications of climate change and the year 2007 began with the first of the series of IPCC-UN reports on change reports and Paris conference Feb. 07.