"Solving technical and marketing problems for companies in the energy and environmental industries."
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-The Freebie- Geoff Dolbear’s Freebie Newsletter - Issue 74 February 2010 -
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Tedlar
An old joke about a failed stand-up comedian has as its punch-line the single word, “Timing”. Bad timing is the curse of many businesses as well, coming out prematurely with a superb product or, as bad, two weeks after Apple or Microsoft announce their new product. A product that came out decades too early is a superb chemical and weather resistant polymer film called “Tedlar.” (By film, I mean a thin polymeric material of the type used in making plastic bags, etc.) Dupont introduced this polyvinylfluoride product in the early 1960s for use on the outside of buildings. At that time, the idea was to laminate the film onto aluminum siding, which then would not need to be painted for at least 25 years.
Tedlar was a great product, but it was, let us say, less than successful, especially by Dupont standards of the time where it was compared to Cellophane and Mylar. This all happened around the time I was at DuPont, and I sat in on more than a few discussions of why Tedlar “didn’t take off.” I was told that quite a number of management people were working very hard to distance themselves from the entire Tedlar issue.
The original architectural applications were market failures, as far as I know. DuPont, however, stayed with the product and used its toughness and chemical stability in a variety of applications. A coworker of mine at the time did detailed measurements of electrical properties of Tedlar films for use in capacitors.
One early application was in bags used to collect air samples for measurement of pollutants; here you do not want ozone and related reactive components to react with the bag’s wall and disappear. Another example, bags again, is for wrapping food containers to protect them from contamination when a home or building is being fumigated for termites or other insects, etc. A web search shows many other niche applications, the most exciting to me being the widespread manufacture of solar electric panels where Tedlar’s weather resistance and toughness are valuable assets.
Mind you, it has taken 40 years of perseverance on Dupont’s part to make all of this happen. To me, this good story shows what wonderful things can be done when people devote effort to solving problems rather than assigning blame.
Words to Ponder
Thinking is easy, acting is difficult, and to put one's thoughts into actions is the most difficult thing in the world.
- Goethe (1749-1832)
PHREG
What to do with garbage once it is collected is a problem in an increasing number of municipalities. This is coupled with the gnawing question of whether burying garbage in some canyon is the best use of our natural resources. Over the years I have been associated with several projects examining ways to convert various wastes to useful energy, the most recent of which is the PHREG venture. This relies on a new technology that converts municipal solid waste (garbage), old tires, hydrocarbon wastes, medical wastes, etc., to gas and molten slag.
Central to the PHREG technology is a vertical shaft furnace. This is basically a big, hot pipe standing on end. Garbage is fed through a lock-hopper system at the top and as it makes its way by gravity flow to the bottom it is heated by gas flowing up from the bottom. Along the way the wastes are successively dried, pyrolyzed, charred, and finally gasified. What cannot be converted to gas – bottles, cans, etc. – ends up molten at the bottom, to be removed as a slag using standard steel-manufacturing techniques. Gas from the top of the furnace contains a mixture of hydrogen, carbon monoxide, moisture, and oily organics. The oils can be condensed (they typically smell pretty bad) and sent back to the burner that provides the intensely hot gas at the bottom. Combustion takes place outside the furnace, and the heating gas contains no remnant oxygen that might lead to toxic dioxins in the gas product.
The hydrogen and carbon monoxide in the product can be burned directly for power. It can also be turned into pure hydrogen, methanol, ammonia, acetic acid, low sulfur diesel, or a host of other products using standard commercial processes (that’s how all of these are made, usually starting with natural gas).
Design and operation of the furnace relies heavily on steel manufacturing technology. One of our partners in the development is a chemist and engineer who specializes in this area. Most of the other operations – gas separations and the like - are pretty standard chemical engineering. Add to that the high temperature engineering computer modeling that is a specialty of one of the team members and the very practical hands-on chemical engineering of another member you have a recipe for a nice development. My role in the development is as eminence grise, the old guy who provides background info and asks hard questions.
Along the way, we have put together a patent application, now issued as US 7,452,392 after a lot of give and take with the USPTO. This included educating a patent examiner who did not understand we were not trying to patent the chemistry we use (old stuff) but a way of carrying it out (definitely new.)
We have presented the work to dozens of potential development partners. Not everyone is interested, but those who are tell us that the current economy is not a great time to develop anything new.
And one other thing: The PHREG acronym has several explanations, and as I recall the “G” on the end stands for either Gasification or Geoff.
Book(s) of the Month
We are all acutely aware that the world is undergoing a major revolution in how information and knowledge is stored and disseminated, a switch from print to digital. How this will end up is not clear at this moment, at least not to me, but I hope the day will come that it will be possible to access all of the information currently in books and periodicals from anywhere at any time.
Such revolutions in handling knowledge have occurred several times in the past. At first the established mechanism could best be described as oral tradition. In Europe, the Greeks founded the academy to collect knowledge for easier access. This was followed later by the library, with a slightly different role. Academies survived in one form or another, of course, but eventually the task was assumed by monasteries, who functioned as repositories and publishing houses. Much later emerged universities, which morphed through several forms to what we see today.
The story is much more complicated than this, and this month’s book Reinventing Knowledge, by Ian F. McNeely with Lisa Wolverton, leads us through the various steps and onward to the research institute and today’s rise of the internet. It is a fascinating journey for anyone interested in how we got to today.
In today’s world, and indeed in times past, there was a second role of institutions of knowledge accumulation: generation of new knowledge. Today’s universities and research institutes, including large private and governmental research labs, often emphasize the new over the old. A complementary book, The Age of Wonder, by Richard Holmes, describes the creation of one such institution for encouraging the generation of new knowledge, the Royal Society in London. The book’s story begins with a bright young botanist, Joseph Banks, who signed on to Captain Cook’s voyage of circumnavigation of the earth. Banks returned with information that made him an overnight star, and he quickly ascended to presidency of the Royal Society in the 1778. Along the way, he championed young William Herschel, the genius astronomer who turned our ideas of the universe upside down with his discoveries. Herschel was born in Hanover, in what is now Germany, and immigrated to England, later bringing along his sister Caroline, who became an accomplished astronomer based on her work with William. Bank’s connections provided what we today would call research grants for construction of ever-larger reflecting telescopes and freed William Herschel from his day job as a musician so that he could concentrate on his science.
Later Banks would help Humphrey Davy, among several others. Davy’s lab assistant at one point was Faraday, who soon emerged to stand on his own. These scientists continued a strong tradition of excellence in British science, leading to the work of Darwin, and Babbage, among many others. Others included William Herschel’s son John, who pioneered the mapping of the southern skies from southern Africa, among other things.
An interesting twist to all of this science in England was the interplay of science and the humanities. Byron, Keats, Shelley and others were associated with the scientists of the time. Davy among others published books of poetry. Rather like today’s Carl Djerassi, who is a successful novelist as well as a pioneer of steroid chemistry, these people were able to “work both sides of the street.” As an aside, Shelley’s wife Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, was the author of what could be considered the first science fiction novel, Frankenstein.
Contact:
G.E. Dolbear and Associates, Inc.909-837-8109