My Work?

Well, I have finally finished my coal gasification paper. It has been two long gruelling weeks in the library and a whole semester worth of intense reading. I have read things that dealt with solar power to hydrogen production, and quite a lot of global warming. Some stuff probably didn't even apply to the paper, but it's important to know about the renewable energy resources that we have available, and it's also important to know the energy conversions and efficiencies that apply to each of these systems. It's also important to get a grasp of what actually happens and how much emissions are produced by these systems so that we can research into designing better processes that produce way less emissions. I wanted to post a picture the energy balance and entropy balance that I have learned, but those equations are way too large to put on here. I had to put some picture, so, I put one of my favorite pictures instead.

Sparingly, I have worked in our engineering labs doing whatever that needs to be done. Today, I am actually meeting with my professor/supervisor to see what else he wants me to do. He has been talking about having me running some ethanol samples through a gas chromatograph (GC). This system is pretty neat because of how it works. When the very small sample is injected into the "shoot," the gas is actually nebulized so that it's particles are broken down so that they can be analyzed by the computer. Some pretty sweet stuff happens here. In a gas chromatograph/mass spectrometry (GCMS), a unknown is ran through the column and the data that is generated from this sample is actually compared to a library of substances. The printout from this sample shows how much (the peak) of what the unknown consists of.

Anyways, not too much to it. I just have to be careful around the expensive equipment, specially in what we call our "lab III." In this lab we actually have a distillation column setup. What's that? lol. It itself can be one system in a plant. Actually, my dad knows quite a bit about these because he has worked with them for a very long time. Now he does that and other stuff with biodiesel. Anyways, we use the distillation columns for the senior students who really mess with ethanol. We also have barrels of brandy. Alcohol! lol, just kidding. It's an experiment that deals with why ethanol seeps through the wooden barrels to the atmosphere. This is something that the brandy distillers actually want to happen. Crazy, otherwise brandy would have a way higher concentration of ethanol and it would probably have a really, really burning taste.

Well, that was my rambling about work before I hit it hard.