Talking Mostly about Coffee this year

Happy 2013 to everyone, I hope everybody enjoyed the Festive season as much as I have.

This will be my final year before I get my degree in chemical engineering, and if all goes well I will be doing my project on the emissions of coffee roasters exhaust gas, and how to make it more environmentally friendly.

This is great news to me as I am a lover of good coffee as well as the science behind it, so this post is just to warn everyone, this blog will be turned into a coffee/science/engineering blog for the duration of 2013.

Any other questions and remarks are welcome as always.

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How to plot an XY diagram for McCabe Thiele method in Aspen Plus

Its been a really long time since I made any posts, sorry for that but work sometimes gets in the way of the things I like doing, like updating my blog. This post might seem a bit stupid but I tried to find out how to do this on the web and it was quite impossible to find a easy step by step guide for making a XY plot in Aspen Plus for use in the McCabe Thiele method for designing a distillation coulomb, so I had to figure it out myself after a lot of fellow class mates had the same problem as me. So without any further a dew here is my 13 steps to making a XY plot in Aspen Plus for a binary mixture. For this example I used the old classic ethanol and water problem. Step1: Open Aspen Plus and this is the first screen to pop up. Choose "Blank Simulation" an press "Ok" Step 1: Begin new Aspen simulation Step2: You are now in the simulation environment and to start the simulation you need to enter the "Data Browser" (Usual simulations you would

Designing a C5/C6 Isomerization unit

As a final year student we need to design a catalytic isomerization unit that effectively rises the octane number by isomerization of n-butane, n-pentane and n-hexane into their respective isomers. I was responsible for the design of the reactor, this was probably the most difficult thing I have done in engineering since I started the course. It took a lot of hard work, but in return I am most certainly a much better engineer.... (P.S. The most difficult part of the project was finding the correct reaction kinetics, and just a note to the reader, I do not fully trust the kinetics that was used in this design.) 3.1 Reactions and Kinetics n-Butane In a process such as the Penex process where carbon strings from C4-C6 are present a large amount of possible reactions can take place in the form of isomerisation and cracking. We will begin by considering the short straight chains and their reaction and kinetics first then move to the cyclic molecules and their reactions. Con

What is fugacity really?

Fugacity is supposed to be easily understood, especially because that was the main purpose of its invention. Lets just get some history straight first. In the beginning there was chemical potential, usually denoted as μ, and defined as: Definition of Chemical Potential with G and n i being the Gibbs free energy and moles of compound i respectively. As you see μ is used to describe the Gibbs free energy, and if you know thermodynamics you should know that Gibbs is used to describe chemical equilibrium in pure and mixed systems, if you didn't know, this is very important. The problem however with chemical potential is that it is an abstract concept, like the amount of honest bankers, in other words, it can not be directly measured. In its stead fugacity was invented by one, G.N. Lewis (Also famous for his Lewis dot structure of molecules and his mustache). G.N. Lewis Partial fugacity, is the pseudo-pressure exerted by the mixture of molecules in the vapor phase, and it i

Chemical-engineering Students

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