Category: Chemspy

I first wrote about MEMS – microelectromechanical systems – some time in the early 1990s. There was a promise at the time of scalable, modular reaction units that would eventually preclude the need for chemical plants to have multi-gallon reaction vessels and enormous distillation towers. Last time I looked, most chemical plants still had those vessels and towers but MEMS technology has nevertheless moved on apace. It has made enormous, or should I say tiny, inroads into the analytical arena in chemistry and life sciences.

One obstacle that stands in the way of the widespread adoption and further rapid development of MEMS technology is the fact that these devices are becoming increasingly sophisticated and so harder and more expensive to prototype.

Some MEMS designs are as complex as microelectronics circuits. But, whereas conventional chip designers can simulate their systems with software relatively easily, MEMS designers need something more solid to carry out simulations of the microscopic movements of fluids and energy in a MEMS device.

Now, Liao Ningbo and Yang Ping of the Laboratory of Advanced Design and Manufacturing at Jiang Su University, in Zhenjiang, and Yi Huijun of the Department of Mechanical Engineering, at Nanjing Institute of Chemical Technology, China, think they have the answer. They have turned to the collaborative and interactive design framework made possible by the concept of web-manufacturing.

In their approach, technologies used in dynamic web Java Server Pages (JSP) and computer graphics Virtual Reality Modelling Language (VRML) are integrated to allow them to model a MEMS device. “VRML, is a scene description language that can be used to describe 3D models of objects and scenes with the capabilities of interactive operations on them,” the researchers explain, “These models can be viewed using a web browser with a free plug-in for VRML2.0.” they add that several tools exist to convert almost any computer-aid design (CAD) format to VRML, which enables geometric models to be easily imported from pre-existing formats without having to redraw them. “VRML can be used to simulate fluid flow, of cause, with the description of fluid equations,” Nigbo told Chemspy.

SOURCE: International Journal of Materials and Product Technology, 2008, 31, 259

An informatics approach to pricing petrochemical products has been devised by scientists at the Market Research Department of the Research Institute of Petroleum Industry (RIPI) in Tehran, Iran. Their model puts a price on “know-how”, which is the most complicated activity of the commercialization stage.

Writing in the International Journal of Technology, Policy and Management, (2008, 8, 279-297), Reza Bandarian, Ahmad Mousaei, Abbasali Ghadirian and Maham Tabatabaei explain their approach. “The RIPI has a mission to bring ideas to market in terms of developing new technologies and new products,” they say, “Commercialization is one of the critical stages in this process.” Their model examines three pricing scenarios – optimistic, pessimistic and actual – for selling technology and was validate against historical data of various RIPI petrochemical products.

There are increasing demands on companies, not just in the petrochemicals sector but across the commercial spectrum. The marketplace needs better, faster and cheaper technology and products, while intellectual property, once simply seen as an expense has become an important source of revenue. Indeed, many of the problems seen in modern business hinge purely on IP rather than solid, hands-on extracted or manufactured resources. IP provides a critical competitive advantage for the firms that hold it but a serious disadvantage for those that do not.

Bandarian and colleagues point out that companies can no longer rely on the incremental innovation, i.e., improving on what has already been done, to compete and survive. Today it seems that “radical innovation” and “breakthrough products” are essential to long-term commercial sustenance. Even governments are beginning to recognize this in their wealth creation programs. The US National Science Foundation (NSF), which funds a huge amount of academic research in the USA not only demands that research projects are interesting, good quality and important scientifically, but that they also demonstrate the solution to a societal need or goal, which might be in constant flux.

The bottom line is that: “What customers want today, they will not want tomorrow, says the team. They point out that almost half the major corporations that existed in 1975 no longer trade. This is probably best explained by the fact that those corporations failing to grasp this simple tenet.

“One of the explanations for this dismal record is that companies are still trying to link emerging technologies with existing markets when they should be linking emerging technologies with emerging markets.”

In Iran and other countries of the Middle East, the researchers explain electronics, medicines and chemicals are major imports, while Iran’s national income comes essentially from oil production. Unfortunately, this resource has been used for wealth creation rather than technology creation. “Traditionally, the oil industry has improved in engineering maintenance while based on technology limitation; we have been kept behind that of developed countries, and the gap has increased.

This is perhaps the most important reason why Iran is the market leader in basic petrochemical products, but in high-value products, we have lost the market against developed countries,” the researchers add. They present a model that could allow innovation to seep, if not surge, through, by using know-how to evaluate and price innovative products, it is based on the low-cost and speed of current pricing models -experiential and mathematical – and side-steps their disadvantages of being untimely, requiring too much pre-market testing, and being highly skills dependent.

The researchers incorporate various factors into their model – the life cycle of know-how, annual market size, raw material and total production cost, selling price, net profit, earned income during investment, risk-free rate of return, know-how investment required, know-how return in its life cycle, know-how annual return in its life cycle, present value of know-how return in its life cycle.

Other factors can be fed into the model depending on the specific characteristics of the product in question. Indeed, “Our comprehensive framework of the commercialization of new technologies in the petroleum industry that can be used with some modification for other industries,” the researchers say. They tested their model retrospectively against RIPI product data and demonstrated an accuracy of around 97%.

A Chemspy reader sent me an email asking about the best way to fix their water softener.

Hi, I have a water softener. I met a local repair service, not affiliated with the manufacturer in any way, who can rebuild my broken unit with better quality after-market parts. Sounds like a good plan to me.

So far so good…the reader goes on…

The repair guy proposes to add some good quality resin to the tank to “top it up” if needed, and to add charcoal to the resin tank as well, as a filter enhancement. He claims the charcoal will get cleaned when the resin goes through the water softener’s normal recharge.

Again, sounds reasonable to me, although I suspect that the efficiency of a unit will depend on the quality of the components and presumably the actual fault and how that has been repaired. But, it was the final sentence of the email that made my heart skip a beat.

I only know charcoal filters as something you put inline, and replace before it poisons the drinker with its collected contaminants. Could the charcoal really be recharged and have the same useful lifetime the resin has?

Can you spot the potentially fatal flaw in what this Chemspy reader is doing with his water softener? I can and I’ve emailed him to tell him to cease and desist with immediate effect or suffer the consequences…your thoughts in the comments below would be appreciated.

There’s discussion all over the chemical blogosphere at the moment about copyright and CAS numbers Chemspider’s Tony Williams first broached the subject in his blog and has followed up here. Cameron neylon has touched on the issue here as too have PeterMR and Kurt Wegner. If I’ve missed any links, please leave a reference to your post in the comments.

Anyway, here’s a thought…

Thumbnails (i.e. reduced size) versions of photos, images, and other visual creative works were recently the subject of a court case in the US, I believe. The judge suggested that displaying a thumbnail of an image was not a breach of copyright.

CAS registry numbers, InChIs, DOI’s and other such “creative works” might, in some sense, be considered an analog of an image thumbnail, and therefore may fall outside of a copyright claim similarly. Has anyone got the legal prowess to test such a case.

However, in writing this comment it occurred to me that there may be a more fundamental factor that would preclude CAS numbers being copyrighted. Aren’t they generated sequentially and automatically? If so, then perhaps they don’t fall under the description of “creative works” and therefore may not be copyrightable at all.

Material safety data sheets (MSDS) is a perennial search favourite on the Chemspy site. The site has its own MSDS section and a javascript widget you can even add to your own site to allow your visitors to search for chemical MSDS sheets (yes, I know it’s a tautology on two counts, chemical material safety data sheets sheets, but like PIN number and “ATM machine”, the phrase is in common parlance.

Anyway, follow the link to search for MSDS on ChemSpy and here if you’d like to add the MSDS search toolbox (feel free to edit the script once you’ve saved it to your server to fit your site’s requirements).

Meanwhile, an offsite resource that looks promising for Chemical MSDS sheets is the obviously named MSDS Search, which duplicates some of the ChemSpy resources but adds a few new ones too.

April 2009 sees the launch of yet another chemistry journal, this one coming from Nature Publishing Group. It will, apparently, “provide a unique forum for the publication of high-quality research in all areas of chemistry.” Well, they would say that, they’re hardly going to tell us it’s a run-of-the-mill publication offering tedious and dead-end research, are they?

The launch site usefully reminds us that, “Chemistry is concerned with the study of matter on all levels, including its composition, structure, properties and how it can be transformed in chemical reactions.” Again, they’re not wrong there. But, speaking of definitions of chemistry, I thought Walt’s definition in Breaking Bad was pretty good.

If you don’t know about Breaking Bad (It’s not on UK TV yet, for instance), the plot involves a stressed-out, 50y old, high school chemistry teacher, who’s moonlighting at a carwash to make ends meet when he discovers his wife is pregnant and he’s dying of lung cancer. In desperation he hooks up with a crystal meth pusher and starts cooking up some highly pure and enormous crystals in the back of an RV. Needless to say the local dealers don’t like him muscling in on their patch, and he attempts to murder them (in the back of the RV) by pouring powdered red phosphorus on to a pan of boiling methanol. A quick lesson in the incredible corrosive properties of hydrofluoric acid – it burns through metal, rock, ceramic, but not polythene – all adds to the fun and games.

Anyway, Breaking Bad, with its periodic table credits, is a lot more entertaining than yet another chemistry journal. Although I am sure the Nature effort will turn out not to be YAFCJ at all but instead a major success, nudging JACS, Chem Comm, and Angewandte a little further along the virtual shelving.

Meanwhile, thanks for Chemistry Lab Notebook for the tip-off.