Europe in a week

 

 

In 1989 I was newly returned to Castrol. Although I was effectively going back to my old job I had a new team in a new location. I was anxious to re-establish myself. I was given in addition an entirely new project to provide support for a new soldering  product for the electronics industry which was to be bought in from a small Belgian company. We needed 25 litres of the product for development.

At the same time I was to visit Opel cars at Russelsheim to talk about and demonstrate a new water based corrosion preventive. Also I was due to give a presentation at a Dutch trade fair.

I persuaded my boss that the efficient way to do all of this was to take a car ( a Volvo 740 saloon, my temporary company car ) across the channel, take the demo equipment with me and call in Belgium at the local operating company on route and pick up the keg of development product. To accompany me I took Brian, the guy on my team who led on corrosion preventives.

Castrol had a good reputation at Russelsheim which I had visited before. We had introduced them to their first water based product which had been successful. I was slightly embarrassed to be congratulated and thanked during my earlier visit; particularly as I hadn’t developed the product myself but had inherited it when I took over the area of corrosion preventives. On this second visit I was to demonstrate another product which again I hadn’t developed myself. This product was a viscous paste which needed special spray equipment.

I set out on a Sunday afternoon to collect my colleague from Abingdon. I was slightly put out that his young son was too shy to meet me; he just stood at the top of the stairs and shouted his goodbyes to his dad. We crossed by Hovercraft which was a disappointment  as the spray makes it impossible to see anything. We spent the first night near Lille and then on to Russelsheim. This was a total flop. The spray equipment totally failed just giving a dribble from the spray nozzle. I had carefully checked the equipment before leaving and the cause wasn’t clear. We were disconsolate.

Our German colleagues tried to cheer us so the trip was a total write off by guiding us the bridge at Remagen. This bridge on the Rhine was on our route north and was the place where during the war the Americans bounced the German forces in 1945 to cross the Rhine. The river was a huge natural obstacle and by successfully controlling the crossing points the German army could have imposed delay and casualties The bridge has now been demolished with only a stub remaining although there is a nearby railway bridge. Of great historic interest but on a grey day hardly a spectacular tourist site.

We left to head north to Antwerp. The next day we made a brief foray into Holland and then back to Antwerp. It is traditional on such occasions that the local unit provides some evening hospitality. On this occasion we were taken to what was considered a posh restaurant. The evening was firstly notable for the chef who came to list our choices. He was a completely incongruous figure; a huge man dressed in chefs whites who had a very high pitched voice. The service was extremely slow and Walter our host was a wine bore. I’m sure his scholarship of wines was exceptional but I for one soon found he told us far more than I wanted to know. An already slow meal seemed to take an age and I was glad to escape back to our hotel.

I had other business with Castrol Belgium but I can’t recall exactly what. On Friday afternoon they suggested a visit to the company whose soldering product I was about to represent. This seemed a good idea and off we went. We were shown around the factory by the boss man and then back to his office for drinks. Fizzy water only as we were  driving. 

This was all an eye opening experience. The factory was as old fashioned as I have ever seen. I had the impression the buildings were ready to fall down at any time and the equipment was simply pre historic. The boss mans office was a huge contrast, luxurious and decorated all around with African memorabilia, spears, shields and the like. As he told us proudly he had spent a long time in the Belgian Congo before its independence.

Consequently it was early evening before we eventually left Antwerp for a ferry back about midnight. Because we were talking equipment out and bringing goods and equipment back we had copious documentation. At every border we had faithfully stopped and got it approved ( and we had crossed a lot of borders ). At the port we heard the dread news that there was an hour queue to process documents. We were both very tired after a long week, the goods were in the car boot, we just looked like tourists so we soon decided to skip the paperwork and get on the boat. Of course we sailed straight through customs. To his great credit the stores manager when we returned sorted out the paperwork without complaining although I’m sure he muttered under his breath.

In retrospect I should have stopped in the south of England but home beckoned and after fighting sleep all the way arrived back home at five or so in the morning. Even with a co-driver it was a lot of driving and a lot of hours in the car. The next week I had plenty of joshing about our European tour, with plenty of remarks about joy-riding around. I was never to do anything like it again- it was air travel for me from then on.

Energy and climate change

 

 

I can imagine groans ” not another post on climate change”. Although climate change is real and happening I want to talk more about some encouraging developments. It is generally agreed that energy is the root of the problem. Mankind has progressed by burning fossil fuels but this cannot continue. But perhaps we need to recast this by asking ourselves what energy we need. Essentially we burn fossil fuels to heat spaces or generate electricity. Leaving aside space heating for the moment lets think about electricity which is a medium of transferring energy.

Electricity is far more in that it is a nearly ideal form of transferring energy. It is efficient, clean quick and capable of transmission over long distances. Electrical technology is fairly well understood and electrical equipment is widely used. Electricity does have one major drawback: it cannot be readily stored. The modern electricity grid matches supply and demand on a second by second basis. In the UK there is only one big storage system and that is pumped water in North Wales. The idea is that water is pumped by electric pumps from a low reservoir to a high one. Then the stored energy is released by allowing water from the high reservoir to flow to the low through electrical generators.

It is just becoming technologically feasible to have grid scale battery storage. A 100MW battery system is operating in Australia. A more speculative possibility is that vehicle batteries could be used as electricity supply buffers. Although discussed no such system is in operation. There is speculation the electric vehicle pioneer Tesla is about to announce plans for use of vehicle batteries to offset fluctuations in electricity usage. Another supply offset occurs with interconnectors between counties. Such interconnectors are in use and are increasing but are necessarily on a very large scale. They exploit the fact that different places use electricity at different times.

It is important to realise that electricity storage possibilities don’t increase non carbon energy supply but they increase the flexibility of supply. This is important because the lead low C energy sources of wind and solar are highly variable. Wind power is particularly interesting because its cost has now fallen to fossil fuel levels. Solar is still more expensive than fossil fuel.

The outsider in many ways is nuclear. The stability of nuclear production for baseload supplies is valuable. Nuclear stations need to run continuously. The problem is that large nuclear stations are very expensive to build although once built they are cheap to run. One possible route forward is to build small modular nuclear stations ( SMR ) which would be factory made in quantity rather than monolithic one off stations as current practice.

Space heating can be considered somewhat separately although there are strong links to overall energy uses. The main technical difference is that whereas electricity generation by thermal means needs high temperatures, space heating doesn’t. Space heating, the internal heating of homes and offices requires modest temperatures. Electricity is both directly applicable and indirectly by powering heat pumps. A heat pump can be thought of as a refrigerator in reverse. The pump is electrically powered but takes its heat from the air or the ground. Very roughly for every unit of electricity the pump supplies about four units of heat. Heat pumps are a well established but little used technology.

There has been a lot of talk of the hydrogen economy. Hydrogen is a gaseous fuel and there is ongoing investigation into using to partly replace natural gas. At present hydrogen is expensive but it could be made by electrolysing water. This means passing electricity through water to break the water up into its constituents , hydrogen and oxygen. One big problem is that hydrogen is rather tricky to handle. It cannot be easily liquefied and is normally stored as compressed gas. For use in vehicles compressed hydrogen can be used in a fuel cell to produce C free electricity. Fuel cells are known and used but their technology is immature.

As far as vehicles are concerned there is another way of looking at the problem. Petrol is a very concentrated form of energy. The weight of petrol to drive a vehicle a long way is modest. Vehicles can be refuelled with petrol in minutes. In contrast batteries are very heavy for the amount of energy they contain and recharging is relatively slow. The recharging rate is being increased but we are still looking at tens of minutes. Charge density in batteries looks much more difficult and despite immense efforts improvements are slow. It seems likely that the energy density of batteries will always be low compared with petrol.

There have been efforts to develop a liquid fuel which is both low C and as dense and easy to use as petrol. The only liquid fuel replacement which has found large scale use is alcohol. Alcohol can be a fuel in its own right or it can be  blended into petrol in low proportions. .Alcohol can be made by fermentation and then distillation( rather like spirits for drinking) but this is fairly expensive and requires a fermentable feedstock.

In conclusion it seems that a ferment of investigation and innovation is occurring. Right now wind turbine generated electricity looks the best way forward with the electricity used to charge batteries for vehicles as well as myriad other uses. Batteries are on the fringe of being adequate both for vehicles and grid storage.

First conference

 

 

It is a somewhat mixed blessing that in my career I have attended a lot of conferences and scientific meetings. These ranged from one day meetings of Chemical Society interest groups through to big international meetings. The latter are often over several days and in my case seemed to be in the USA. I even got to present a paper at one such in Washington. Meetings  over several days also happen in the UK and my very first was of this type. I was a very junior staff member at Unilever Research and my boss at the time clearly felt he should send me to one as a consolation for not being chosen to attend a big meeting in Holland.

I was in the Information Section at the time and one of my allocated areas was chemical analysis. I’m sure he thought it very appropriate that it should be the Technicon Autoanalyser  meeting in Brighton in 1966. The Autoanalyser was produced by Technicon Corp. in the US and it used segmented flow analysis. This means that separate amounts of liquid reagent were moved along tubes with each quantity of liquid separated from the next by air bubbles. A simple application therefore was to pass the reagent into the sample and measure a colour change using a colourimeter. The intensity of the colour gives a measure of the concentration of the ingredient in the sample. Far more sophisticated techniques are possible using the same idea of moving discrete quantities of reagents

Autoanalysers automate repetitive steps which otherwise would be done individually by a technician. One common application is the routine analysis of clinical samples. This lowers the cost and speeds the result. At the time in 1966 Unilever used Autoanalysers for such things as phosphate analysis in detergents. To do this and mainly to develop new uses two chemists Ron and Tom were employed.  Such development requires a lot of skill and knowledge and these two were the company experts. In contrast I was almost abysmally ignorant. I had only just become acquainted with the routine analysis by them and that at a very superficial level. As for their development goals I had no knowledge.

As individuals I got on with them quite well. Tom was older ( fifty plus ) and affected a certain worldly cynical outlook. Ron was younger ( maybe thirties) much more enthusiastic although keener to talk about cars that chemical analysis. Rather later Ron helped with a big DIY car repair which became a group effort when I had moved to the main laboratory.

We arranged to meet and travel together by train from Liverpool Lime Street station. It was there I committed a major blunder. I hadn’t travelled for Unilever before and in accordance with their instructions I bought a first class ticket, boarded and looked out for Ron and Tom. I didn’t see them and decided I had better continue on that train. After a while I searched the train and found them sitting happily in second class. They laughed at me and asked if I hadn’t realised that the thing to do was buy second class but claim for first. I spent the rest of the trip with them thinking I was naïve and had wasted money.

Brighton is an important conference venue and to welcome us in style there was an evening reception at the Brighton Pavilion. This stunning building was commissioned by the Prince of Wales in 1787 and is in a pastiche in Indian style. It is very ornate and sumptuously furnished. I remember nothing much of the reception but the tour of the Pavilion was stunning. I recall being hugely impressed by the large kitchen with monster copper cooking vessels plus a spit well capable of ox roasting. The Prince was a notorious glutton.

The conference was staged at the Metropole Hotel which was too posh for me to be staying there. I was in a nondescript hotel fairly close by. The conference took the form of several meeting rooms where presentations were made simultaneously so it was a matter of choosing a session to attend. Also there was a large exhibition of Autoanalysers mainly actually doing a wide range of analyses. To me this latter was by far the most interesting. There was something rather charming about watching slugs of reagents powered along transparent tubes, propelled by peristatic pumps and watching as a stream of results appeared without any intervention. This was deceiving in that setting up the techniques must have taken much effort.

In contrast the conference sessions were quite boring. I had no particular interest the analyses discussed and by the second day I decided to play hooky and explore the city. I found the famous Lanes which are narrow streets bordered by quirky shops quite interesting although everything was far too expensive for me. I had been working for only a year or so and Annette was a student teacher.

Looking at the internet now I see the Autoanalyser has developed enormously with computerised operation and all kinds of fancy detection techniques. Analysis is an area which has developed amazingly in the past sixty years and detection for example of parts per billion of impurities in water is quite routine. In general the demand is so large that it is worthwhile to develop dedicated equipment say for clinical samples with the Autoanalyser for more general applications.

As for me I was glad to move to a quite different area. I have never used the ( limited ) knowledge I gained at this conference.