Month: May 2014

It’s all about talent management (Day 4)

As a professor of energy engineering at Imperial College London you would expect me to have a passion for education and a desire for learning. Hopefully, they are virtues we pass on to our students, which they hold throughout their careers.

But once students leave and enter the world of work their employers become pivotal to their continuing professional development.

And that’s why IChemE set-up its Corporate Partner initiative. The scheme publicly recognises organisations that invest significantly in their chemical engineering talent.

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Magnets and wine (Day 3)

The alchemy of wine-making is centuries old. Many traditional methods are still used and the subtle aromas, delicate tastes and overall drinking experiences of fine wines are valued and celebrated all over the world.

Sparkling wine - sliderBut that doesn’t stop inventive engineers taking a fresh look at wine production in their quest to reduce costs and improve efficiencies.

Connoisseurs of sparkling wines will know that part of the process involves a secondary fermentation to produce the bubbles and a period of up to 60 days to allow the waste yeast to collect in the neck of the bottle. To remove the yeast, the bottle neck is plunged into freezing liquid and the frozen yeast extracted with the aid of the internal pressure in the bottle produced by CO2.

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Fuel from barren land? (Day 2)

Biofuels are the cause of much debate and they are controversial in many parts of the world for their displacement of agricultural crops.

Algae - sliderHowever, new analysis in the US suggests that biofuels from algae is more efficient than some other sources of biomass and, importantly, can be grown on untillable land. They believe that land not suitbale for farming in countries like Brazil, Canada, China and the U.S. could be used to produce enough algal biofuel to supplement more than 30 percent of their fuel consumption.

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IChemE Award winners… win again (Day 2)

IChemE Global AwardsAfter winning three trophies, including the top prize, at last year’s IChemE Global Awards in Bolton, Queen’s University Belfast has been named among the winners of the prestigious Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) Awards for its ground-breaking work in removing harmful mercury from natural gas.

The technology developed by Queen’s University Ionic Liquid Laboratories (QUILL), in partnership with PETRONAS, is being used to produce mercury-free natural gas at two PETRONAS plants in Malaysia.

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Graphene revolution for chemical engineering (Day 1)

We’ve heard a lot about Graphene in recent years and it’s an area which is promising a revolution in electrical and chemical engineering

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Graphene is the world’s thinnest material. It is a potent conductor, extremely lightweight, chemically inert and flexible with a large surface area. It could be the perfect candidate for high capacity energy storage.

It’s an opportunity the University of Manchester, UK, is looking to exploit in the coming years.

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Time for chemical engineers to speak out (Day 1)

Communication is a central theme of my presidential year and I want us all to be more active in emphasising to those outside our profession the value of chemical engineering as an agent of ‘change for good’.

Speak Out with words - smallBe it with government, NGOs or the general public, we engineers are not as effective as we might be at conveying what we do, what needs doing and what we could do to get that done.

Let me try to illustrate what I mean by taking my own area of future energy and climate change avoidance as an example. Although great progress has been made in convincing governments and the public that climate change is a reality (with some obvious sceptical exceptions), convincing them of the need to respond quickly enough and on a large enough scale to avoid its catastrophic consequences is proving very difficult.

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ChemEng365 is launched (Day 1)

Geoff Maitland

It is a great honour to serve as the Institution’s 74th President and I look forward to a busy and exciting year.

I would also like to congratulate my predecessor, Judith Hackitt, for her leadership and outstanding ambassadorial work for the chemical engineering profession over the past 12 months.

Chemical engineers have a key role to play in addressing major global challenges concerning energy, water, food and health and Chemical Engineering Matters, IChemE’s technical strategy, enables its members to make a contribution to these key issues wherever they are. It’s a message I will repeat throughout my presidency and it should underpin all our activities.

Continue reading ChemEng365 is launched (Day 1)