When people hear the name Xerox, they may not immediately think of chemical process engineering. But chemical engineers play a critical role in the development of the advanced materials embedded within Xerox technologies.
Source: Celebrating our Chemical Engineers for #EngineersWeek | Xerox Newsroom
Autism, or more accurately Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), is in the news and public view a lot in recent years. According to some recent reports, it is now diagnosed in 1 out of 68 children (1.47%) in the U.S. Reasons for the apparent increase in diagnoses over recent decades are complex, but they lead us to wonder what is happening and what are the causes?
Recent scientific literature suggests that the specific causes are largely unknown, but there is a very strong genetic component (heritability of 80%). Unfortunately, even the genetic aspects are very uncertain and probably highly complex, not just a simple set of genes like the ones that determine your eye colour. Although genetics may play a large role, there are also indications that environmental factors are involved, perhaps in some sort of interaction with the genetic factors.
The popular and social media keep going in circles about vaccines, a factor for which there is no reliable scientific evidence at all. At the same time, there seems to be complete ignorance of a growing body of scientific literature linking ASD with air quality. A quick search through peer-reviewed scientific literature using the Scopus database shows at least 160 papers that mention “autism and ‘air pollution'” somewhere in the publication over the past 20 years.
I don’t know a lot about ASD, but I can comment on air pollution and so here I’ll discuss what I see from some of this literature. Much of the research literature is only fully available if you have access to a university library (like me), but I’ll try to provide some links to at least the summary or abstract of the studies. Much of this literature is highly technical however, so don’t worry if it’s not so easy to digest.
HR managers say that many job hunters are not writing cover letters anymore. Learn how you can standout if you use these proven cover letter writing formula.
Source: Formula For Writing An Attention-Grabbing Cover Letter
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Comment: This is a pet peeve of mine, after having served on multiple hiring committees for faculty (and some staff) positions. I’m surprised at how many applicants don’t provide a cover letter to start off their extensive faculty C.V. and other documents. My practice is to generally ignore applications without a cover letter. Why? There are several reasons:
So if you’re truly interested in a job (especially a professional or higher level position), spend some time researching and analyzing the position and do a brief cover letter that highlights things of interest to the employer. It might not get you the job, but at least it’s more likely to pass the first stage of screening.
Waterloo Engineering has direct program admission, meaning that there is no general first year. The co-op program you start on day 1 is where you stay, unless some other path opens up to you and you take it. This also means that the number of students in each program is relatively stable from year 1 to 2 to 3, etc. A few drop out for various reasons along the way, but nothing too drastic.
Toronto Engineering has an interesting “hybrid” admission process, where some students are admitted directly to a program (like us), and some are admitted to a more general “Track One” program for first year. The Track One students move into other programs for 2nd year. I thought it might be interesting to see how that admissions approach affects program enrollments in 2nd year, and luckily they publish their data in their academic calendar so it’s easy to figure out. You just have to pick a calendar from a previous year, look at year 1 data, then pick the calendar for the following year and look at year 2 data to see the progression for a cohort of students. For the example I compiled below, I picked the 2014 and 2015 calendars. Continue reading
An interesting news story about the measurement of air quality on cruise ships appeared recently. Specifically, it dealt with the concentration of ultrafine particulate (UFP) matter in the air on four cruise ships, measured by a researcher from Johns Hopkins University. UFP is invisible matter with diameters of around 100 nanometres (nm), which is about 1,000 times smaller than a human hair, and it is implicated in airway inflammation and effects on other organs in the human body. Being interested in air quality, I looked up the actual study report which you can also read here. Here is my take on the work and meaning… Continue reading
My department put together a nice short video about Chemical Engineering. It shows some quick images of areas where chemical engineers work, such as alternative energy, pharmaceuticals, water, food processing, and others. And there are more images about the laboratory research and teaching going on in our facilities. Have a look and see what you think.
The Ontario government recently announced a 10% tuition discount, as I mentioned earlier. Along with that, they also announced that many fees will have to be made refundable for any student that doesn’t want to pay them. The theory is that it will give “students more choice over the fees they pay” and save students money on top of their 10% discount. It’s quite unusual for governments to start micro-managing university fees, many of which were set up to address local conditions and concerns with student support via a referendum. There is an exception in the announcement however, and fees that “fund major, campus-wide services and facilities or fees which contribute to the health and safety of students are deemed mandatory”. These mandatory fees include walksafe programs, health and counselling, athletics and recreation and academic support. So, I was interested in how this affects engineering students at Waterloo, and compiled a list of fees (to the best of my ability). It’s complicated but here they are with some comments and observations. Continue reading
With recent moves to permit sales of cannabis in Canada and some U.S. states, commercial operations are popping up in various locations. Whenever new industries emerge, there are often new environmental impacts to consider and air pollution seems to be an increasingly common problem with cannabis too. Not from smoking, but rather from the greenhouse operations where it is grown under lights in high-density conditions to save space. It turns out that these intensive grow operations can have vented air emissions that are rather smelly, as this one news item describes.
Like all plants, cannabis emits volatile chemical compounds at various stages in its growth. Some work has been reported in research literature, identifying over 200 chemicals in the air, although I suspect that paper missed a lot of odorous sulfur compounds that are often associated with “skunky” smells. A lot of the odor compounds are terpenes or their relatives (e.g. limonene, pinene, linalool), and the paper mentions cymene, benzaldehyde, nonanal, and decanol as key odor chemicals. None of these compounds are particularly hazardous (at least at the normally low concentrations found around plants). None of them are specific to cannabis either. Lots of them are produced by various plants, in varying amounts and combinations. A lot of plant-based essential oils that you can buy contain similar chemicals.
The environmental issue arises if the odor interferes with the neighbouring property and their ability to use and enjoy their property. The Ontario government website has some information about odors and property-owner rights . Under Ontario’s Environmental Protection Act (Section 14) odor-emitting industries can get into legal trouble because they are emitting a “contaminant” that causes an “adverse effect”.
From an engineering point of view, the control of odorous emissions like this is not unlike many other industries with odour concerns, like sewage treatment plants, rendering plants, some food manufacturers, and some chemical manufacturers. The first step is containment, so that odor emissions are not just leaking out of the buildings from a multitude of locations. If everything can be efficiently captured in one or two well-controlled ventilation systems, then emissions controls can be applied to those vent streams before they discharge into the environment.
It’s not clear at this point what type of emission controls are best for both efficiency and cost points of view. Usually there are several possible solutions, so engineers have to figure out which one is the most cost-effective. Standard approaches to odor control run a range of technologies from wet scrubbing to activated carbon capture, to biofiltration and possibly photochemical oxidation. High temperature thermal oxidation is another option, but probably overkill and too expensive for this application. One solution may not fit all commercial operations either. Each location would need a thorough engineering analysis and assessment for a good recommendation, which is something done by chemical and environmental engineers (and some mechanical engineers too). Companies that rushed into production without doing these assessments may get stuck with expensive retro-fits once the Ministry of Environment comes knocking.
So, with every new “industry” there are issues that come up that may or may not have been anticipated by the business people. Those issues will keep regulators and engineering consultants busy for a while.
Some interesting results from my colleague’s research group. I add some further context below the link…
Researchers at Waterloo Engineering have created a powder that could be used to reduce greenhouse gases at factories and power plants that burn fossil fuels. The advanced carbon powder, developed using a novel process in the lab of chemical engineering professor Zhongwei Chen, could filter and remove carbon dioxide (CO2) from emissions with almost twice the efficiency of conventional materials.
Source: New powder could reduce greenhouse gas emissions | Engineering | University of Waterloo
My Context/Analysis: Some interesting work in materials science and chemistry. From the published paper (sorry it’s behind a paywall, but I can read it through the university’s subscription), I can see that the amount of CO2 captured is about 1.6 mmole of CO2 per gram of powder, or about 70 mg/g, at flue gas conditions. As the paper points out, this is pretty good for CO2 adsorption, but it is not a miracle cure for all of our problems. To put it in context, in 2016 the U.S. electricity sector emitted something like 1,800,000,000,000 kg of CO2 (from the EPA website). So, if the powder can capture 70 mg per g it would take about 26,000,000,000,000 kg of powder for one year of capture. That’s a lot of powder!! And that’s only for one sector in the U.S. alone (representing about 28% of U.S. CO2 emissions). So, it’s important to continue doing research, find new things and look at potential applications in a wide range of fields. But carbon emissions and climate change is a huge problem and there aren’t any easy answers. Reducing CO2 emissions will generally be better than trying to capture them afterwards, like the three R’s hierarchy (reduce, reuse, recycle).
The Ontario government recently announced a 10% reduction in tuition for the 2019-2020 academic year, followed by a tuition freeze the next year, and there are some other changes to student aid programs. (Note: the 10% reduction applies to Canadians, not international/visa students.) A blog by Alex Usher has a nice summary and analysis of the announced changes, and he concludes that for students the bottom line is that wealthier families will save some money, and less wealthy students will end up with more student loans.
Everyone likes a discount when they’re shopping. For the retailer, they give up a bit of a markup or profit margin but still generate some profit. However universities are non-profit institutions and have no big markup to give up. So, although I have no particular insider information about the effects on the universities, it’s not difficult to predict.
For engineering, if I recall correctly tuition makes up over 50% of the revenue stream for teaching so a 10% tuition cut is at least a 5% revenue cut. There might be some economies to be found here and there, but most of a university’s budget goes towards salaries. Over time there will likely have to be some shrinkage of staff and faculty numbers, and we’re already postponing some filling of vacant faculty positions. Students are unlikely to see or notice big changes, but there may eventually be fewer elective courses available, for example.
As Alex Usher’s blog points out, one way universities could respond is to admit more international students who pay a lot more tuition. Hopefully this would not be at the expense of admitting Canadian students, but when governments start applying shocks to the system there can be unintended consequences.
A Professor in Waterloo Engineering 