LIGHTS OUT, EQUIPMENT OFF

Kathryn Berndtson, a master of health science candidate in the Bloomberg School of Public Health, recently spent a lot of time trying to answer some questions. How did the school consume enough electricity to be responsible for 25,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions last year? How could so many educated, socially aware faculty, staff, and students be so excessive in their energy consumption?

Her quest began when she and three other Bloomberg students — Julia White, Sean Baird, and Becky Stepnitz — did a case study for a two-semester course combining ethnographic field work and qualitative data analysis. The team was free to choose its subject. The students wanted to do something related to the environment and promoting responsible energy consumption. For her part of the project, Berndtson decided to examine why the Bloomberg School used so much power. Over eight weeks, the team conducted focus groups and interviews, observed lab work, and dug through the school’s archives. Berndtson spoke with lab-science students, staff, and faculty to learn how their habits and perceptions affected their energy use. The results, she hoped, would “offer insight into barriers to energy efficiency.”

Data from focus groups and interviews led her to observe a fundamental conflict between doing science and conserving energy. One major drain, she found, was the electricity used to heat, cool, and light the school’s building 24 hours a day, every day of the year. The school does not set lab hours; students and researchers can come in and work whenever they want. Security staff, too, work round-the-clock. Likewise, many of the lab’s appliances — freezers, baths, insectaries, other lab tools — are always on. Some, like freezers and insectaries, have to run constantly. Others, like the water baths used to heat or cool beakers containing samples, do not but are turned on and off frequently and are rarely unplugged. Berndtson and her group also collected data that suggest the school errs on the side of caution when it categorizes almost all of its trash as biohazard waste, which means a lengthier, energy-consuming disposal process.

Students interviewed knew they weren’t using energy efficiently, says Berndtson, but felt it was a necessary evil, an unavoidable consequence of science. “I don’t think the demand [for 24-hour access] is huge,” one administrator told her, but added that limiting access wasn’t an option. Some experiments require constant attention, and students like having the freedom to work anytime. “You never know when you’re going to use [an appliance],” one student said. “So it might as well be warmed up and ready, because you don’t want to wait. It throws off your whole schedule.” Berndtson found that first-year PhD students preferred to use equipment after hours, when there was no need to compete with post-doctoral fellows. In her report, Berndtson wrote, “Repeatedly, participants stated that convenience was more important to them than saving energy — even if 24-hour access was not always needed to guarantee scientific outcomes, participants enjoyed the flexibility in scheduling that it allowed them.”

Berndtson noted the divergence of attitudes in students’ personal and academic lives. They reported conserving energy at home, but never at the lab. Faculty, too, admitted to conserving less than they could. “We all talk about conservation,” said one professor. “But at the end of a faculty meeting, everyone puts their garbage [including recyclables] right in the trash can.”

In 2007, the Bloomberg School replaced 30,000 incandescent light bulbs with compact fluorescent lamps. That action alone resulted in a 2 percent to 3 percent reduction, equivalent to 890 metric tons of carbon dioxide, according to an unpublished audit by the Bloomberg School’s Center for a Livable Future. But the next steps, says Berndtson, will be much more difficult, requiring behavioral changes by students and faculty.

“We have great aspirations,” said a support services administrator quoted in Berndtson’s report. “But when you start targeting student or faculty time, you need to go for small wins.” Mandating set hours or temperatures in the building, the administrator said, would risk loss of students and faculty who value constant access to labs and other amenities. What’s more, the Bloomberg School accounts for only 7 percent of the total energy consumed by the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions. This limits its influence on decisions made by the LLC that buys power for JHMI.

Katherine Fritz, adjunct assistant professor in Bloomberg’s Department of International Health, was one of the faculty members guiding the project (the other was Lori Leonard, associate professor in the Department of Health, Behavior, and Society). Fritz says the group’s research could be expanded to collect enough data to influence Hopkins policies. The study, she says, reflects “a burgeoning interest among students in the links between health, public health, and sustainability.” Fritz finds it gratifying to see students making connections between the environment and public health. “We encourage it, for sure,” she says. “But the students are leading the way.”

When she returned from summer travels, Berndtson planned to share the findings with the school’s environmental stewardship committee. She hopes to trigger a new study that would articulate the long-term financial benefits of greater energy efficiency in Bloomberg’s labs. “I think if people actually had those numbers in their hands,” she says, “they might just do something.”

Siobhan Paganelli, A&S ‘08, was Johns Hopkins Magazine’s spring 2008 Corbin Gwaltney Fellow.

The organisations involved are the US Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) in Washington, the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics (DICP) in Dalian, and China’s Institute of Coal Chemistry.
All three organisations are internationally recognised for research in developing improved technologies for safe and clean production of energy from coal and have mutual interests in:

o High temperature chemistry and diagnostics related to coal gasification.
o Functional sorbents design and development of syngas separations.
o Catalysis for hydrocarbon synthesis and conversions.

The three partner institutions have complementary research programmes without a lot of duplication. Where there are overlaps in currently funded projects, the teams initiate joint projects with each organisation using resources from their individual government funding agencies.
“With demand for energy – both electricity and transportation fuels – increasing, despite efficiency gains, coal usage is going to increase in both countries,” said Mike Davis, associate laboratory director for energy science and technology at PNNL. “Our challenge, on the research side, is to make it happen cleanly and economically. Together, I believe we can make important strides in this effort.”
“This is a unique opportunity to design and test new processes – such as carbon dioxide capture – that will reduce significantly the environmental impacts of coal usage,” said Doug Ray, associate laboratory director for fundamental science at PNNL.
Initially, the consortium is collaborating on air separation, coal gasification, cleanup and separation, and water gas shift reactions in the gas stream, hydrocarbon synthesis and carbon dioxide capture and utilisation.
However, the ICFCE’s first breakthrough has come with gas flaring. According to the Paris-based International Energy Agency, about 400m tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent is released this way every year.

In new work, researchers have identified the structure of a catalytic material that can turn methane into a safe and easy-to-transport liquid. The insight lays the foundation for converting excess methane into a variety of useful fuels and chemicals.
“There’s a big interest in doing something with this ‘stranded’ methane other than flaring it off,” said PNNL chemist Chuck Peden. “An important thing researchers have struggled with is determining the structure of the active catalyst.’
That catalyst – molybdenum oxide sitting on a zeolite mineral – converts methane gas into the more tractable liquid benzene (Fig.1). But the process is not yet commercially viable. Scientists do not understand enough about the molecular details to improve the catalyst. Now, researchers at PNNL and the DICP have worked out some of the details that will help researchers zoom in on an efficient catalyst.
They reported their results 26th March in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. This work is the first publication to come out of the ICFCE.
To get these results, the chemists – led by Peden at PNNL and Xinhe Bao at DICP – used the world’s largest instrument of its kind – a 900-megahertz nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectrometer. The NMR is armed with one of the strongest magnets constructed and can be outfitted to investigate solid samples, a step above its smaller cousins.
The combination of molybdenum oxide and a zeolite mineral had been shown in 1993 to convert methane, but the catalyst has been difficult to analyse. Researchers know that the zeolite anchors molybdenum oxide in place so methane and molybdenum oxide can react chemically, either on or in the zeolite channels. But no one could tell which comprised the reactive form: a small nugget of one or two molecules, or a larger cluster of many molybdenum oxide molecules.
“This uncertainty has led to a controversy in the scientific literature about the active phase and reaction mechanism of methane activation on these promising catalyst materials,” said DICP’s Bao.
Enter the world’s largest NMR. The technological problem lay in the molybdenum oxide itself. To study this particular oxide with NMR, the chemists needed to pick up the signal from one variant of molybdenum, 95Mo; the ultra-high field of the NMR, housed at the DOE’s environmental molecular sciences laboratory on the PNNL campus, allowed them to do so.
“The higher magnetic field improves the signal to noise,” said Peden. “And its large sample volume allowed us to put enough catalyst into the spectrometer to overcome the poor sensitivity of 95MoNMR.”

The researchers painstakingly prepared catalysts with increasing concentrations of molybdenum in the zeolite scaffold and focused the 900MHzNMR on the samples. The data revealed two different forms of the catalyst, as expected. One form contained the smaller nugget and the other form comprised the much larger clusters. When the concentration of molybdenum rose, more of these large clusters formed.
Then the team added methane and measured how much got converted into benzene by the catalysts. They found that when more smaller nuggets were present, more benzene was made, indicating the variety of one or two molybdenum oxide molecules was the reactive one.
Now, said Peden, the challenge is to design and produce the active form of the catalyst that could be used for large-scale benzene production, research that Bao and his group are already working on.
“We need to figure out how to get that structure and keep it that way,” concluded Bao.

Waterjet cutting and abrasive waterjet cutting are no longer specialised processes for niche applications. Recent developments in cutting equipment mean that these processes are now suitable for the economical production of a wide variety of components, as Jon Severn reports.

Good product design is as much about understanding the capabilities of the manufacturing processes as it is about fulfilling the product’s functional requirements. Designers therefore need to appreciate how processes are evolving, and one that is developing fast is waterjet cutting and the related process of abrasive waterjet cutting.

From the early 1970s, when waterjet cutting was first used commercially on paper-based materials and honeycomb materials for the aerospace industry, development progressed rapidly until the 1980s, when abrasive cutting was commercialised. Modern waterjet and abrasive waterjet cutting equipment is robust, reliable and versatile.

Typically an ultra-high-pressure intensifier (pump) delivers water at up to 4150 bar (60,000 psi) such that it exits the cutting nozzle at Mach 2-3 (680-1020 m/s). Diamond or sapphire is usually used for the nozzle to maximise the cutting life. Where used, the abrasive material is usually garnet or olivine.

While most machines cut two-dimensional (2D) profiles, others use a cutting head mounted on a multi-axis manipulator to enable three-dimensional (3D) shapes with angled sides to be cut from thicker sheet. It is also possible to mount a cutting head on a five- or six-axis robots to enable, for example, complex mouldings to be trimmed.
Waterjet and abrasive waterjet cutting are remarkably versatile.

On the one hand they can cut thin paper-like materials or soft materials such as foam, rubber and food products; on the other hand, they can cut very hard and brittle materials, including hardened steel and granite. They can also cut composite materials, meat products, and carpet. Very thin materials can be cut with ease, and abrasive waterjet cutting can be used to cut up to 180 mm of concrete or 400 mm of steel. Clearly the hardness and thickness of the workpiece have an impact on the cutting speed, as does the surface finish required.

One application for which abrasive waterjet cutting is proving popular is the processing of brick and stone for decorative architectural features. Manchester Brick & Precast, one of the largest brick cutting companies in the UK, has used the process for several years and has recently upgraded the intensifier on its existing waterjet cutting machine, enabling thicker materials to be cut, delivery times to be reduced, and less time and money to be spent on maintenance. After many years of hard use, the original 25 HP (18 kW) pump, cutting head and abrasive handling system were reaching the end of their useful life. These were all replaced with a 50 HP (37 kW) Classic ultra-high-pressure intensifier, an Autoline cutting head and abrasive handling system, all from KMT Waterjet Cutting Systems.

Longer life

One of the drawbacks with waterjet and abrasive waterjet cutting used to be the short life available from the nozzle and the seals in the cutting heads and intensifiers. However, developments in these areas have resulted in considerably longer lives. Intensifier seals today can easily last 1700 hours (compared with 40-50 hours for previous generations) and cutting head seals can be expected to last 2000 hours (compared with 60-80 hours).

Similarly, developments in abrasive mixing units - such as the latest KMT Feedline IV metering system - help to make the cutting process considerably more cost-effective by reducing the maintenance requirements and the costs associated with machine downtime.
Something else that helps to minimise downtime is improved diagnostics. Intensifiers such as the KMT Streamline SL-V 60 offer a touch-screen control with guided maintenance procedures, as well as remote diagnostics via the internet. Compared with its 50 HP (37 kW) predecessor, this intensifier is rated at 60 HP (44 kW), which means that it can serve either one 0.35 mm orifice or two 0.25 mm orifices at 4100 bar. KMT also manufactures Streamline intensifiers in power ratings up to 100 HP (75 kW); these bigger units are often used with multiple cutting heads, thereby helping customers to minimise the investment needed to operate a machine with multiple cutting heads or multiple waterjet or abrasive waterjet cutting machines.

The three-dimensional cutting capabilities of waterjet and abrasive water jet cutting have already been mentioned, but this subject is worth exploring further. Flow International Corporation has a video on its website that illustrates the potential of a five-axis robot, with examples of plates being cut while held at an angle to the machine bed, complex aperture profiles being cut into curved surfaces, a thin-walled truncated cone being cut form thick material and, probably the most impressive, a fan with 15 curved blades. The UK’s Nottingham University is another organisation at the forefront of waterjet cutting. As well as working on ways to use a six-axis abrasive waterjet cutting machine to create pockets in aerospace components, the Nottingham researchers have recently developed a way to cut thin double-curvature polycarbonate with pure water.

Another way in which waterjet and abrasive waterjet cutting are starting to move away from the traditional two-dimensional applications is in the forming of blind holes. It is well known that the two cutting processes are capable of starting a cut away from the edge of the workpiece by first piercing through the material, but some users and researchers are starting to create blind holes by stopping the flow before the hole has penetrated to the far side of the material. Currently the challenge is to control the shape and depth of the hole, but progress is being made in this area.

For product designers, it could be argued that the most significant development in waterjet and abrasive water jet cutting in the last five years relates to improved machine productivity and, therefore, a more cost-effective process. Nevertheless, the use of five- and six-axis robots also creates new opportunities, and the pocketing functions currently being developed are likely to make waterjet and abrasive waterjet cutting even more versatile in the near future.

Aerospace technology solves Easter egg problem

After developing an innovative spraying technology for decorating chocolate Easter eggs, Thorntons realised it did not have a reliable way to cut spraying masks from 1.5 mm thick polycarbonate, as most cutting technologies either melted or damaged the material. The company therefore approached the UK’s Nottingham University.
Twelve months previously experts in the university’s School of Mechanical, Materials and Manufacturing Engineering had joined forces with Rolls Royce, the East Midlands Development Agency and the Midlands Aerospace Alliance to establish what was believed to be Europe’s first waterjet machining technology centre. The €1.4 million (£1.1 million) centre houses equipment including a six-axis computer-controlled waterjet machine. One of the most advanced of its type in the world, the machine can carve cavities and cut almost anything.

Philip Shipway, Professor of Engineering Materials, said: “The attributes of waterjet technology make it the method of choice in certain circumstances, particularly when heat and high forces need to be avoided. When we were approached by Thorntons, we could see immediately that we had a technology that fitted the bill. That is not to say there were not challenges to be overcome, but a combination of ingenuity and hard work by all involved has enabled us to deliver a first-class solution. Thorntons benefits, and we have developed our know-how; everyone wins.”

David Brealey, a chocolatier at Thorntons, added: “We have been working with a spraying company on developing a machine that will allow us to spray chocolate as a decoration; the difficulty we experienced was when we tried to make stencils for our Easter eggs. Trying to cut 1.5 mm polycarbonate over the curvature of an Easter egg was causing the development team a real headache. We had tried pretty much every method of cutting available and found water jet cutting to be the most successful. The problem was getting the cut to follow the curve of the egg. Luckily for us our local university had this state-of-the-art six-axis cutter and initial trials proved very successful. Without the technology and support of the university, the potential of the spraying system would have been very limited.”

I was inspired to choose chemical engineering when I first saw the chemical formula from my father’s chemistry book. The chemical formula shapes look fascinating and interesting to me.

My father is an organic chemistry lecturer in Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM). When I was 14, I read his organic chemistry book and willingly learnt from it by myself. When I was 17, I wanted to have a career associated with chemistry. Back then, my first choice was chemical engineering and my second choice was biochemistry. To be honest, I was unaware of what chemical engineers do and what the industry is like. I could not imagine it due to lack of exposure and information.

After completing my high school education, I pursue my A-Levels and took 3 core subjects which are essential for engineering: Physics, Chemistry and Mathematics. Then I continued my degree in chemical engineering. I managed to get a place in Bradford University, United Kingdom. I was unlucky because in our contract, practical training or sandwich course is not included by our sponsors. Therefore, we don’t have any valuable practical and industry exposures. That doesn’t matter and I keep on studying until I graduated in 1999.

Post graduate - Research and Development

After completing my degree, I returned to Malaysia and was appointed as a research assistant for 5 months in UTM. I joined “Chemical Reaction Engineering Group” (CREG) which its main research was developing the single step conversion of natural gas to gasoline using zeolite catalyst. It was a very interesting topic and that encouraged me to further my chemical engineering masters degree in it. Hence, I then became a full time research student and my research title was “Optimization of Oxidative Coupling of Methane (OCM) Using Experimental Design”, which is part of the natural gas to gasoline research project. As a master’s student, I conducted a thorough research, synthesized catalysts, run experiments, optimized reaction, published technical papers, presented posters and participated in related science-technology exhibitions. I learned and used various analytical equipments such as X-Ray Diffraction (XRD), Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM), Fourier Transform Infra Red (FTIR), Atomic Adsorption Spectroscopy (AAS), Nitrogen Adsorption (NA), Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) and Gas Chromatography (GC). Besides that, I developed my own experimental rig to study the reaction of natural gas and the catalysts that I synthesized. To optimize the experiment, I used “Response Surface Methodology” (RSM) – “Central Composite Design” (CCD) from Statistika software. The software enabled me to arrange my experiment systematically and I can easily obtain a model equation for the reaction. With CREG, we won numerous local and international awards from our research and inventions. It was such a great honor to be part of a successful research group.

Oil & Gas Exposure – Servicing Company

After completing my masters, I was offered a job as chemical technologist for a local oil and gas servicing company. In a year, I became a project/chemical engineer in the same company. My main task was to lead the “internal pipeline chemical cleaning” project for a local oil company. We basically have to assist the oil company to reduce corrosion activities inside the downstream pipeline and prolong the life span of it. The pipelines were chemically treated using degreaser and corrosion inhibitors; and physically cleaned using pigs. It was part of my responsibility to ensure correct formulations as well as performing necessary test to ensure the chemicals were fit to perform its duty. To efficiently and effectively monitor corrosion activities in the pipelines, we utilized latest corrosion monitoring techniques such as electronic resistant probe (ER) and field signature method (FSM).

I was also in charged of the oil and gas specialty chemicals. I traveled to a number of offshore platforms in East Malaysia to conduct deoiler and descaler tests for their oil reserved. It was very challenging and fun performing those tasks. I love going offshore because the working hours are less compared to the amount of time we spent on the platform. The foods are marvelous and comparable to 5 star hotels. Entertainment and other activities such as television, movies, snooker, ping-pong, gymnasium and reflexology chair are made available for the platform dwellers. To be able to go offshore, I have to undergo Helicopter Under Water Escape (HUET) training and get myself an offshore passport.

With this job, I traveled extensively and visited neighboring countries, Singapore and Indonesia, for work purpose of course. In Kalimantan, Indonesia, I joined our company principal to conduct bottle test field trial for local oil company on their onshore oil rig. It was a very interesting and exciting assignment because I got to see how simple the setting of an onshore oil rig because in Malaysia we only have expensive and complicated offshore oil rigs/platforms.

Oil & Fats Industry – Refinery and Other Challenges

I love my oil and gas career but I was unfortunate because I could not continue being in that industry. The company management has bigger plans and they moved to Kuala Lumpur, the capital of Malaysia. I was instructed to transfer which I could not do because I don’t want to hinder my wife’s career establishment as a lecturer/researcher/consultant in UTM and we also have just purchased a house in Johor Bahru in the same year.

I seek for other jobs and managed to get one in a physical refining plant associated in the oil and fats industry. This is a whole new chapter and totally different from my previous job. I’m required to scan in and out every time we enter or exit the factory. Life is no longer as flexible as before. I don’t have ample time to do my work and that made me work longer hours and I always reach home when it’s already dark. I don’t really mind because it’s a new working environment and I know I have to learn as fast as possible. I set my target to know everybody around my circle of work as soon as possible.

My first task given by my boss was to identify and list down all the valves in the plant I’m in charged of. It was an interesting and good assignment. It made me traced the entire pipeline from the feed tank to the plant and to the product tank. I learned a lot of stuff regarding valves. I know and understand various types of valves, brand/ origin, sizes, spare parts, principle/operation, tag number etc. In addition to that, indirectly, I learned about the plant process and operation. That was just the beginning.

Being in a process plant is a perfect place to learn and put in practice your unit operation knowledge. It also gave me a better comprehension on what process control is all about. I learned about other supporting units like heat exchangers, cooling towers, boilers, utility boilers and much more. The learning curve continued everyday and never stopped.

Not only that I learn about all the technical stuff, handling manpower and conflict is another challenging area that I made myself good at. Manpower is not an easy matter to deal. Some of my down line manpower never experienced any disciplinary action taken when they violated certain laws such as coming in late and simply not coming to work. Despite a series of reminder and warning, the bad attitude still continues. I could not stand it. With the support of my senior colleague, I enforced the discipline and forced them to obey. I gave the problematic staffs some disciplinary action. I want them to learn some lesson and be more serious on their responsibility and work.

During plant shut down or some called it turn around, I learned a lot. Techniques on ensuring the fastest and effective way to cool down the plant, managing and coordinating a team of people to service the plant, conducting air test, steam test and driving the plant start-up are among some knowledge I acquired during a number of shutdowns of my plants.

Academia, Research, Consultancy, etc…

After about 3 years working as a process engineer, I became a lecturer. A lot of people from various background asked me why I want to be a lecturer? The answer is very simple. I know I can contribute more as a lecturer. Lecturer is not just educating students. It is more than that. A lecturer job scope include:

- Pengajaran (Educating/lecturing)

- Penyelidikan (Research)

- Penerbitan (Publication of books etc)

- Penyeliaan (Supervision)

- Penulisan (Writing technical papers)

- Perundingan (Consultancy)

- Perkhidmatan masyarakat (Social services)

There are more to tell about this new career of mine… Perhaps later, I shall share more about it.

A Little Something from Me

There are a lot more to share, but it’s impossible to include everything here. I’m glad to have experienced chemical engineering in three different areas; research (academics); oil and gas; and oil and fats. Each area has their own challenges, advantages and unique.

Being very vague about the chemical engineering industry during my student life urged me to improve the situation. Wouldn’t it be nice if somebody can tell and share what they can expect from the industry? It will be some sort of a chemical engineering informal education for the students and other junior engineers. That is why despite of my busy life as a process engineer, I progressively and continuously share some of my experiences in my “Chemical Engineering World” blog that I created on the third quarter last year. I sincerely hope it can provide at least some useful information for fellow young chemical engineers. I believe it’s a good thing if other professional and practicing engineers out there can do the same for others to benefit. It will be a great contribution.