Blog 1

Week 1

Week 1 Term 1 - This week's lesson was just getting to know the lecturer, Dr Noel. He likes to run and is born in Indonesia but I thought he was from the Philippines :') In my group, there is Yeung juen aka YJ, and Keith and they both like to play a lot of games that I cannot relate :)

Week 2

The lesson in week 2 focuses mainly on chemical products and chemical engineering principle

Chemical product classification 

A chemical product is any product that is manufactured with chemical engineering principle. 

Chemical product

1. commodities 

2. Molecular products

3. Microstructured products 

4. Chemical devices 

Chemical engineering principle 

1. Fluid flow - Rheology, flow regime etc

2. Heat transfer - Heating, cooling, evaporation etc

3. Mass transfer - Distillation, extraction, leaching etc

4. Mechanical process reaction - Grinding, blending 

5. Thermodynamics - Vapour liquid equilibrium, refrigeration(Carnot cycle) etc 

 

Relating chemical engineering principles to the design of a chemical product, this is what my group came up with :

Equipment-

Water Heater (Household - appliance)

Chemical engineering principles applied- 

Heat transfer: Heating of water 

Thermodynamics: Well insulated (Engineered to ensure that optimal amount of heat is transferred to the water effectively)

Chemical product-

Chemical devices: Brings convenience as it eliminates the long process of boiling, especially to a desired temperature.

Quiz on Digital Fabrication Safety:

Week 3(LOA)

The lesson in week 3 focuses mainly on identifying consumers' needs by identifying things that bother us on our day-to-day lives.

Pain points - problems arising from your product 

1. Interaction - customer services like hotlines are inefficient 

2. Purchasing - Complicated payment methods/ hidden cost 

3. The compatibility - product is not able to work under different circumstances due to the absence of certain devices 

4. Functionality - glitches/ bugs, inconveniences that cause the product to not be efficient

Finding out pain points - Interact with your users/ consumers 

Live (interaction): 

1. Live chats

2. Interviews 

3. Sales calls

Online (interactions):

1. Surveys

2. Reviews 

3. Customer support ticketing

4. Social media threads 

Focus on how well your product is performing now and how it can be improved for better performance in the future. 

The following part consists of the importance and significance of a literature review. A literature review allows us to analyze different researches done that are similar to our product. It also helps bring our idea alive by making us question ourselves on the topic and allowing us to think from different perspectives. a good and effective literature review helps us to: 

1. Identify Sources and research that are reliable (being backed or supported by experts) 

2. Identify questions to help our research 

3. Allow us to think in different perspectives 

4. Prevent plagarizing

Practical 1: Reverse Engineering

Part 1

For practical 1, we were tasked to analyze the working principle of a coffee machine together as a team. Along with me is Hongyi, Mavis, and Kieron.

 To begin, we started by brewing the coffee with a coffee machine that was never taken apart before. This is a safety precaution to prevent us, users from experiencing any accidents such as electric shocks, fire, etc. We then collected the necessary data such as volume, mass, and temperature of the different components (like the coffee brewed, residual coffee, steam) to calculate the amount of heat energy used by putting in place what we learned in previous modules such as using Q=mcpdt to find sensible heat and Q=mhv to calculate latent heat. After finding out the relevant data, we were surprised to see that the amount of heat gained by the coffee was a large difference from the heat generated by the coffee machine. Hence, we traced back our steps and realized that there were many components not taken into consideration such as condensed steam on the lid,  amount of steam generated, amount of water, and residual coffee on the filter. These are factors that should be considered as heat energy is also generated by them which affects our overall answer. 

To find out the operating principle, we dismantled another set of coffee machine that has not been operated. While doing so, we found 2 orange tubings that were connected to a round heating element positioned at the bottom of the coffee machine. 1 of each contains a metal in it, after examining how it works with the heating element by pouring water through each tube, we realized that water was not able to flow into the orange tubing with the metal piece, however, it flowed out of it instead. I immediately thought of what I learned during the Process Operation Skills module and concluded that the metal piece was a check valve that only allows one-way flow. Additionally, my group and I also found out that the orange tubing (with check valve) was connected to the condenser at the top of the coffee machine with a white rubber tubing. 

By piecing the information we found and working backward, my team and I were able to understand the mechanism of how water in the water tank enters the bottom, gets heated up, and enters the condenser to get condensed to form a large amount of hot water. By implementing this reverse engineering concept, we identified how chemical engineering concepts such as thermodynamics were used. For example, when hot water is being heated by the heating element, it vaporizes partially becoming higher in temperature and pressure and thus travels upwards towards the lower temperature and pressure. This relates to the 2nd law of thermodynamics we learned in Heat Transfer and Operations module in year 1.

Part 2

For part 2 of the practical, my team and I did an experiment to find out air lift of a pump. We concluded through our experiment that the higher the submergence of the U-tube, the higher the flowrate with the

same amount of pump pressure. This is most likely due to the larger static pressure at higher submergence since pressure = h⍴g. We linked this concept to the coffee machine and found out that it was also due to the formation of steam that pushes the water up to the condenser and not solely due to the 2nd law of thermodynamics as mentioned before.