ChemEbytes Index 02 Editorial A Unit Operations Guide for the Chemical Engineering Layman Ladies and Legends Chemistry and Chemical Engineering Book Review: The Alchemy of Air Catalysts: Current Research and Future Developments 03 04 07 09 11 15 It gives me great pleasure to congratulate students, teachers, and staff of the Chemical Engineering depart- ment for the newsletter’s first publication. The news- letter is believed to be a focus of the inside activities, i.e. academics, students and faculty achievement, and innovation occurring in the department. In the era of engineering and technology, this newsletter will moti- vate the teachers and students to share their creativity and new ideas with the world and help in their overall development. As society’s demands are rising day by day & hence the production has to increase, the time has come for all chemical engineers to come forward and join their hands to serve this society and country better. I wish best of luck for all the team members for publication of the newsletter. It gives me immense pleasure to congratulate stu- dents, teachers, and staff of the Chemical Engineering department for the newsletter’s first publication. The newsletter is believed to be a focus of the inside activi- ties namely academics, achievements by the students and faculty, and incredible innovations occurring in the department. We believe that keeping track of all the alterations will definitely have a positive influence to constantly improve than the previous year. In the era of engineering and technology, where the need of the hour is hands-on talent, this newsletter will moti- vate the teachers and students to share their new and creative thoughts with the world and also to harness these developments. It’s a well-known fact that chem- ical engineers design and troubleshoot processes for production of chemicals, fuels, pharmaceuticals and biologicals. As society’s demands are rising day by day & hence the production has to increase, it’s showtime for all chemical engineers to come forward and join their hands to serve this society and the nation better. I hope all our efforts yield a positive outcome. I wish best of luck for all the team members for publication of the newsletter. DR. P. KALAICHELVI HEAD OF DEPARTMENT SURYA B J EX-COM Editorial 03 A UNIT OPERATIONS GUIDE FOR THE CHEMICAL ENGINEERING LAYMAN Distillation, evaporation, filtration, absorp- tion, extraction, crushing, leaching, dry- ing.... There seems to be no end to this list but it’s never a bad idea to get your feet wet with this vast ocean that is ‘Unit Processes’ before it’s too late, especially if you aspire to become successful in chemical engineer- ing and related fields. You had probably encountered the term ‘Unit Operations’ during your first ever domain-specific lecture. That means this really is something that’s going to stick with you for the rest of your chemical en- gineering future, which in turn means they are of serious importance to the chemical engineer. They are so common that if you “A Chemical Industry - where Unit Operations rule!” aren’t familiar with them, you’re going to be looked at as if you are a fighter jet pi- lot without a license. A ‘Unit Operation’ is nothing but a ‘step’ in a process. A step as in something that gets you closer to your goal. In our day-to-day life, that could be something as simple as commuting to col- lege, or as complex as solving differential equations for hours. Specific to chemical engineering industries, it could be as sim- ple as heating something in order to re- move water, adding water to dilute a mix- ture or as complex as separating several components from a mixture using metic- ulously designed equipment. During every unit operation, we have only one objective- to move closer to obtaining the end prod- uct. 04 Now that we are clear with what unit op- erations are, we are ready to jump into the details. Let us look at something familiar. If we have ever prepared a cup of tea (not using teabags, of course), we have proba- bly used a strainer to ‘filter’ the tea. That is one unit operation in itself and is one of the most frequently used ones in any chemical industry. We, of course, do not prepare tea in an industry, but we use ‘filtration’ to fil- ter solids from a mixture of solids + liquids (known as slurry). We encounter slurries in numerous industries and it is almost always important to separate the solid and liquid components. We are often interested in ei- ther the solid or the liquid part but rarely both components of the slurry and filtering is the elementary step (by now, you should be using the term ‘unit operation’ and not ‘step’) in such scenarios. To quote some spe- cific examples, we use filtration to remove contaminants from bottled water. Also, specialised filters are required for custom- ized processes. There’s definitely a lot more to filtering, but that is left for you to explore. “ Vac uum Filters - One of the most commonly used filters” Up next is something that is as self-explan- atory as things can get. We are going to discuss ‘crushing’. Since you already know what it means, we shall try to go into a bit more detail as to how and when this is being applied in a chemical industry. Ba- sically, we reduce the size of the material below a specified value. A crushing cham- ber is of prime importance in an industry that deals with ores or rocks as raw mate- rials. Ores and rocks cannot be processed as they come and hence they need to be of uniform size for subsequent unit oper- ations (not ‘steps’). Some typical examples where this is put into use is the cement in- dustry, where limestone is the major raw material. Limestone arrives at the industry directly from quarries and it is crushed to a powdery form before cement manufactur- ing takes place. One more example is the manufacture of sugar from sugarcane. Ex- tracting the juice from sugarcane is once again the first step in the manufacture of sugar and crushers do the trick once again. As you might be able to deduce, crushing often occurs in the preliminary stages of a full-fledged process- the stages involving raw materials. Let’s look at something that’s reserved to industries now, something more complex to carry out than tea straining but at the same time, simple in principle. Industries often deal with chemical reactions and they end up with a mixture which contains more than one component- say acetone and water. The instinctive next step in all industries would be to separate acetone and water (or whatever the components of the mixture were). While filtration was done when one component was a solid, we have liquid components now. We make use of a basic physical property that differ- ent components boil at different tempera- tures (at a given pressure for the omnipres- ent perfectionists). All of us are aware that water boils at 373K and we can recall our chemistry teacher from school reiterating the fact that acetone boils at a lower tem- perature than water. In essence, acetone will boil at a temperature when water will still be a liquid! So, we collect this acetone and condense it to complete the distilla- tion process. This is not only for 2 compo- nents, but can be extended to many com- ponents, provided there’s an appreciable difference in the boiling points of materials. 05 This is applied in the petroleum industry where we have to separate the many dif- ferent constituents of crude oil. Crude oil contains methane, ethane, propane, some butane (and some other branched hydro- carbons). We employ fractional distillation (in plain words, distillation with many out- lets) to separate these components. Such cases often require precise monitoring of conditions and are in general expensive. These are three important (you guessed it, all of them are important) unit operations. With the advancement in technology, the areas of application are widening and new sophisticated instruments are being developed everyday in order to increase the efficiency of unit operations. Through changing times, the goal shall ever remain constant- ‘Improved processes, an im- proved lifestyle and an improved environ- ment.’ Distillation Column Image Source: wikipedia.org Crushing Chamber - from Rock to Powder Image Source: rocktechnology.sandvik.com “A crushing chamber is of prime im- portance in an industry that deals with ores or rocks as raw materials.” 06 Article written by Pranav Sridhar K LADIES AND LEGENDS “Chemical engineering? No way! That branch is for boys. You can’t work in those risky industries. Choose some other branch with easier placement chances.” “Look at Sharma uncle’s daughter, she’s a CSE graduate and now is happily settled without any tensions. You are not choos- ing chemical engineering and that’s final.” “Why do you want to perform experiments with your future. You’re a girl and working in those day/night shifts at the industries is not safe! Drop your choice.” This is the regular drama at a girl student’s home when she just declares her choice to graduate under a challenging branch like Chemical Engineering. This trend contin- ues forever and ever. Well, one of the rea- sons for parents to freak out when such a bold decision is made by their daughter is the lack of knowledge of how successful women are in the same path. People believe that men are usually better at science concepts than women. That’s not the case. It is true that men continue to dominate in various areas of engineer- ing even till date. On the contrary, there are some potential female engineers who proved their worth in their profession. If you also believe that women do not get enough grades in this field, you’re living in the past era! “Women are good at soft skills while men are good at technical stuff” is not the trend now. Engineers need both and dedi- cated women can get equally good at both. Parents also fear that success in this field is challenging, that women can’t reach to the top positions during their work span. Wake up people! There’s a long list of girl bosses around the world! Let’s have a look! 07 PADMASREE WARRIOR Starting from a bachelor’s degree at IIT Delhi and master’s degree at Cornell University in Chemical En- gineering, Padmasree Warrior is an Indian- American businesswoman and technology executive who was the CEO of NIO USA, an electric car maker. She was listed as one of the 100 most powerful women and America’s top 50 women in Tech by Forbes. RAMA GOVINDARAJAN Rama Govindarajan did her undergraduate degree from IIT Delhi and her master’s degree from Drexel University, Philadelphia, USA in the field of Chemical engineering. She is an Indian scientist specialized in the field of Fluid Dynamics and presently is working as a professor at ICST, Bengaluru. Prof. Govindarajan is a recipient of the Shanti SwarupBhatnagar Award for the year 2007. SARA AKBAR Sara Akbar, CEO and co-founder of Kuwait Energy is a Chemical Engineer with a BSc from Kuwait Univer- sity.Initially she was a petroleum engineer in Kuwait Oil Company in 1991 and moved up to several posi- tions before joining KUFPEC as Business Develop- ment Manager in 1999. In 2005, Sara co-established Kuwait Energy. She was also awarded the Charles F. Rand Memorial Gold Medal in 2013 for her incredible achievements in the oil industry. Other awards in- clude 2009’s Leader in Energy, recognizing her as the leading woman in the Middle East’s oil and gas indus- try. 08 There are many other women who suc- ceeded with flying colors in this field. Though this department has its own tough road, sheer will and perseverance is the mantra of success. We always see women compromising their interests due to family pressure or other safety issues. Role mod- els like Warrior, Govindarajan and Sara give a ray of hope amidst these fears. Their suc- cess is an inspiration to the others. 09 Kudos to all those bright and strong girls who fought their way and chose Chemical Engineering despite all second thoughts posed by parents, relatives and other neg- ative forces. Remember, Article written by Shreya 10 11 “THE ALCHEMY OF AIR: A JEWISH GENIUS, A DOOMED TYCOON, AND THE SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY THAT FED THE WORLD BUT FUELED THE RISE OF HITLER” BY THOMAS HAGER BOOK REVIEW Priyadharsan M 12 Thomas Hager’s “The Alchemy of Air” is a brilliant, fast paced account of the discovery of the Haber- Bosch process and the two men who developed it, Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch. In the words of the Author himself, “This is the story of two men who invented a way to turn air into bread, built factories the size of small cities, made enormous fortunes, helped engineer the deaths of millions of people, and saved the lives of billions more” In 1898, Sir William Crookes, in his first ever speech as the President of the British Academy of Sciences, warned the civilised world of a “deadly peril”. That deadly peril was mass starvation. The ever-growing population was on its way to soon overtake the global food supply The farmers at that time depended on Chilean nitrate (sodium nitrate) that was mined in large quantities from the Atacama Desert. But it was a natural source that would eventually be exhausted. The solution, Sir Crookes believed, was to find a way to fix at- mospheric nitrogen. To find a way to synthesize nitrogen fertilizer from the air. The Author starts the story by briefly covering the history of fertilizer and later, the harvesting of bird guano and the mining of Chilean nitrate in detail. He then takes us through the events of the 19th century surrounding nitrate production. The wars, the politics, and the bloom of the ni- trate industry. We are then brought back to the main plot. Fritz Haber finally developed a method to turn atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia in the lab- oratory. But that, as the author points out, was not an easy task. Haber had to overcome many technical difficulties and worked with levels of temperature and pressure unheard of at the time. But his experiment was conducted in a ta- bletop machine. The real problem was to scale it up to make it work on an industrial level. BASF, the chemical firm with whom Haber had signed a deal, assigned Carl Bosch, their young engineer, to do the impossible. Carl Bosch, along with his team of highly skilled scientists and engineers, succeeded in developing an industrial process that is now known as Haber-Bosch process. He set up the first plant in Oppau, Germany in 1913 which was functioning with its full capacity by 1914. But all of this is just one part of the story. CARL BOSCH (1874 - 1940) By Nobel Foundation - http://nobelprize. org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/1931/ bosch-bio.html FRITZ HABER (1868 - 1934) By The Nobel Foundation - http://nobel- prize.org/chemistry/laureates/1918/index. html 13 Haber-Bosch process launched their careers as leaders in their respective fields. Haber became Germany’s lead- ing chemist, a world-renowned scientist, and the head of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. Bosch went on to become the head of BASF, a leading industrialist, and a pioneer in high pressure chemistry. Both won a Nobel for their con- tributions, Haber in 1919 and Bosch in 1931. They also made choices that they would later regret in their life. Haber developed chlorine gas which was used against the Allies’ troops in World War – I and is now regarded as the father of chemical warfare. He was also a super patriot and converted from Judaism to Christianity to become a “true” German. He was left without a country when Hitler rose to power. Bosch had his Haber-Bosch plant produce sodium nitrate, which was used in explosives, to help Ger- many in World War – I. The war would have ended much sooner without Haber-Bosch. He also helped found and headed IG Farben. the company which fuelled Hitler’s mad dreams. He realised, later in his life, the impact of his life’s works and lost his will to live. The Author finishes the book by touching upon the cur- rent day implications of the Haber-Bosch process and its impact, both good and bad, on the world. He also warns us about the environmental impacts of the process, of which very little is known. Something that astounds the reader is the sheer scale of the impact of the Haber-Bosch process. The Haber-Bosch plants today consume about 1 percent of the world’s total energy production. And about half of the nitrogen in our body comes from Haber-Bosch plants. Thomas Hager skilfully takes us through this complex, eventful story while providing historical context for each event and offering incredible insights into the minds of these master scientists. At first glance, Alchemy of Air might seem like a book written for a scientifically inclined audience, but the author uses as little technical terms as possible and the story reads more like a fast-paced adven- ture. The Author also builds an interesting portrait of Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch and their meteoric rise and tragic ends. In 2011, the readers of The Chemical Engineer (tce) magazine voted Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch the most in- fluential chemical engineers of all time. The Alchemy of Air provides every argument for why that is true. Haber- Bosch process may have helped feed billions of people, but it was also responsible for the deaths of millions. The story of Haber-Bosch is a good example of the two-sidedness of human ingenuity. Overall, the book is highly engaging and hard to put down. It is also very thought-provoking with regard to scientific advancement and its unintended consequences. “ SOMETHING THAT ASTOUNDS THE READER IS THE SHEER SCALE OF THE IMPACT OF THE HABER- BOSCH PROCESS. THE HABER- BOSCH PLANTS TODAY CONSUME ABOUT 1 PERCENT OF THE WORLD’S TOTAL ENERGY PRODUCTION. AND ABOUT HALF OF THE NITROGEN IN OUR BODY COMES FROM HABER- BOSCH PLANTS. ” 14 FIRST AMMONIA REACTOR FROM BASF DURING ASSEMBLY AT THE OPPAU FACTORY (1913) By © BASF; BASF-Negativnummer 1795-alt, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/ index.php?curid=74097272 15 16 17 18 Article written by Suyash P 19 DESIGN CREDITS NAVEEN RASIKA SHYAM SANDEEP YAMINI COVER PICTURE FROM WWW.UNSPLASH.COM