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gregor

I had an interesting idea recently: A set of pumps, valves, filters, reaction chambers, sensors, electrodes and power supplies, process controllers etc. in a range of materials which are compatible with the reactants that may be encountered, designed by a team of chemists and chemical engineers to allow nearly any of the existing chemical engineering processes used today, at a small scale. And to prototype new ones.

I wonder how many parts it would require? What if it turns out to be a quite manageable number like 50 parts? They can then be scaled up or down to produce practical - size systems. The thing is that chemical engineering processes can be scaled down easily (I think), it is scaling up that is the problem.

Because under this system, with a library of open source designs to choose from, you could make a vast array of useful products, many of them which are stated as desirable for OSE and in a very flexible way from a fair range of feedstocks:

-plastics
-sodium hydroxide, sulphuric acid and other basic chemicals etc.
-starting materials for the nife battery (or any other battery)
- Arguably refining of scrap steel back to virgin steel is a chemical engineering process.
- Recycling of waste-stream materials
- The aluminum production is essentially a chemical engineering process.
- production of fuels, lubricants etc.
- other useful materials like silicon carbide etc.

This could also greatly speed up the open sourcing of chemical engineering by allowing engineers and chemists to play with it in their garage etc. and produce new and better processes that they can then publish easily. It could be awesome. And you don't , of course have to buy the whole kit in one go, you can buy whatever parts you need at the time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemical_engineering

Jason

I thought about this too. I think there could be a lot of potential here. It seems that all chemical processes are done on very large scales, and they've generally always been that way. They start out with a lab experiment, then that lab experiment is scaled up into a large process. However, a reconfigurable small scale process could potentially revolutionize a field that has always done things a certain way. Thanks for posting this.

gregor

The more I think about this the more interesting it seems:
Manufacturing comes down to rearranging atoms.

Fabrication as the term is usually used indicates rearranging atoms at a scale of micrometers (with some exceptions).

Chemical engineering fills is the ability to rearrange atoms at an atomic scale.

Flexible fabrication has many advantages for our purposes, as described on the wiki and elsewhere.

flexible chemical engineering Has many of the same advantages, and some more, when applied on a small scale like we are talking about.

When comparing the use of chemeng systems that are each custom made (using a replab or similar) vs. FlexChemEng in which standardized parts are used, the advantages go (with the symbol pointing towards the more favorable one, ? indicated depends on circumstances):

Custom Chemeng vs. FlexChemEng:

Capital cost ?

Ease of sharing designs and operating procedures >

Easy of troubleshooting >

ease of tweaking the system after construction (important since feedstocks may change) >

interfacing with other processes including other chemeng processes esp. to process system wastes (important) >

ease of design (helps the chemist to know that if they choose parts from the FlexChemEng there is no need to worry about if they can be made practically with the replab) >

When comparing against depending on society's existing chemeng infrastructure (buying the materials):

Buying vs. Flexchem eng:
reliability (includes price hikes, political instability etc.) >

safety and toxicity (toxic additives often added by mfgrs to save mere pennies, which we can easily avoid) >

capital monetary cost (depends a lot on the details) <

environmental friendlyness >

localizability >

running monetary cost ? (depends heavily on details, remains to be seen)

can be used for recycling processes >

What else is there?

There have been more than a dozen processes that have been identified as desirableable to implement. FlexChemEng could help a lot both in the design stages and to the eventual users.

greenlinePCS

(Almost) Everything can be captured (or recaptured) with some long and difficult series of reactions. As the villages will be widely spread, and mineral/biomaterials will be different, so we have different starting points. Different virgin materials going to usable compounds, complexes, etc. It is my thought, that we need to develop a Boolean Algebra framework, that allows for coders to follow a process map that will be a program where different starting values of different resources. To do this we will figuratively know where we are starting from (core samples from factor e farm, or anywhere the GVCS will be deployed), After that, we have to find out what is in it, from tools like Atomic Emission Spectrograph, HPLC, GC, ftir, etc. Once we have that data, we have our input values, which determines what process' the raw material goes through to extract what resources we can garner from it. Now the first challenge I have identified is the need for fluorine. I learned that tea plants have one of the highest concentration of fluorides of any plant material of agricultural value, and so I think that is a great place to start. Plus, green tea is good for you :)

I have a beginning process map started. It is not perfect, but it is a good starting point, and I will scan it and put it on photobucket after I redo it and make it legible to people other than me. :)

mjn

I think this is a very promising line of thought. I urge you to create a space on the OSE wiki to start capturing the questions and ideas. By all means continue to explore the idea here in the forum, but start collecting knowledge a and links to relevant information on a set of wiki pages. As some concepts start to get fleshed out (like what tools are needed to assess local raw materials or the Boolean Alegbra idea), spin them out into their own sub-pages. Create a wiki category like Category:Chemical Engineering and start clustering your pages.

- Mark Norton

greenlinePCS

Sounds good Mark.

abhijit116

Hi, what's OSE;s thinking for producing commodity chemicals, any community needs diverse kinds of chemicals for different uses, recently I came upon EPFL approach to produce chemicals using microreactors http://actu.epfl.ch/news/microreactors-improving-manufacturing-by-going-sma/ , this approach should lead to desktop chemical microreactors?

dorkmo

video sounded pretty cool. wish i knew more about chemistry.

poli

The production of chemicals and base materials from local resources is a topic that should start getting more attention as the core GVCS 50 machines come online. Bioplastics synthesis seems to be a doable chemical process that would greatly expand the OSE product ecology and would demonstrate open source can be the basis for an advanced civilization. I have been trying to organize a plan for polyethylene production at FeF and figure out a design for reactors and the materials needed (solvent, substrate, and catalysts). Polyethylene seems very doable from ethanol with a fluid bed reactor and the right materials. Anyways those interested in working on these projects see the wikis:
http://opensourceecology.org/wiki/Fluidized_bed_reactor http://opensourceecology.org/wiki/Polyethylene_from_Ethanol

A brief overview of the plan is to build a small scale fluid bed reactor (20 cm internal diameter and less than 2 meters in height) which is highly reconfigurable and designed to prevent fouling. The reactor will first be configured with a AlO3 catalyst to dehydrate ethanol to ethylene. Ethylene gas product will be collected from a velocity reduction zone above the reactor and saved under pressure. A reactor can then be configured with a Ziegler-Natta, chromate or other transition metal catalyst for polymerization. Ethylene will be introduced as a gas to the bottom of the chamber and solid/fluid polyethylene will be collected from the reaction zone. I will upload CAD models I made of the reactor to the wiki tonight but I haven't been able to make them entirely accurate using freeCAD.

I would lean away from starting with microreactors because the technology is still very much in development, the low volume would be inefficient for commodity materials, and there is a great deal of information freely available for more developed reactors (such as fluid bed or fixed bed).

Jason

I've been thinking about chemical synthesis, and I've come to the conclusion that there are two main areas that need to be addressed. The first is documentation, the second is hardware.

Once you have a basic lab up and running with a fume hood, basic glassware, stands, and burners, you can do a lot. However, the knowledge to do so is lacking. There is no central place to get reliable information on how to produce something safely and effectively on a small scale. All that information is locked away in people's heads who work in this area. Your options are to try to do it from textbooks, try to piece it together from intensive research and forum discussions, etc.

If there is any danger at all involved, people will not explain how to do it on forums. You're forced not to use expert information, but use people who aren't experts.

All the information should be freely available and should be accessible but it isn't, except without large amounts of research required for any one thing you want to do.

What I envision is centralized information on how to do various processes, assuming a standardized set of equipment and glassware. A system of warnings and cautions should be intelligently built in, such that once a person understands a certain danger or issue, that warning can be hidden from that point on. No one is going to read 25 cautions every time if they are continually stacked up.

The above central documented core can then be expanded to larger scales (using vessels which are 1 - 50 gallons) with custom setups. Certain processes can then be derived from the central database and specific "tools" can be defined, like a polyethylene production machine. But to make a seperate tool around every chemical process is too difficult due the the large number and their permutations and combinations. However, if everything is documented with a standard lab procedure, then people can probably up-scale their own stuff most of the time, and the most important processes can be split off into efficient and documented designs as needed.

poli

I appreciate the sentiment of this thread but I think most the posts show an underestimation of the resources needed to do research and figure out a new a reaction protocol. There are relatively few reactions that if open source protocols were developed the OSE product ecology would be greatly expanded. Therefore I believe it is the best use of effort of people with chemical technical knowledge to contribute to specific OSE projects, such as bioplastics, metal refining, bioenergy, or agroecology. OSE is doing pretty good at attracting talent and knowledgeable people but there is a gap between young people who are more open to open source and an older generation of technical experts who have worked entirely around the concept of IP. Demonstrating an open source project that harvests local materials for local use has a better chance of attracting the attention of these experts than building a website that has open source tutorials for basic chemical reactions or is asking said experts to contribute to a an unproven project. If OSE can manufacture high quality polyethylene vinyl acetate plastic for the greenhouses from local materials and harvested or recycled catalyst it would get some pretty serious attention.

To produce high quality materials specialized machines will be required that can precisely control a reaction and have built in safety features. Bench-top, glassware protocols cannot produce the quality of materials needed for an advanced civilization and it would be inefficient and dangerous to attempt to do so. I have added CAD models of the reactor and 1 piece of the reduction zone to the fluidized bed reactor page and am working on finishing the last piece and putting together a system engineering breakdown diagram. Again an FBR has high efficiency in controlling fluid phase reactions with solid catalysts and has multiple uses for OSE and will be constructed to be modular and conform to OSE specifications.

morphtrust

nice on the micro reactors. if I can get slabs of the catalysts like the zeolites I could mill these with micro tubes like they are showing in that video to make one of these.

Jason

@poli
I pretty much agree with you. The main thing I was thinking however is that it would be easier for individuals to contribute to a database rather than a machine, because it's completely electronic and lives on the web. Once the lab is defined, pretty much anyone can type up a procedure. It would probably consist of procedures by high school students at first, and many would be inefficient, or just wrong. However, someone can come along later and improve it. It's the type of thing that could attract hobbyists, etc, even bring people to the OSE.

The machine is much more economically valuable as you point out, but probably reduces the potential contributors by 1000x or more - of course it's also that much more valuable on a farm.

So I suggest work on the machine if you are able, if there is someone who is interested but can't contribute maybe they can start chemipedia or something.

Jason

Goldmine: http://www.nzic.org.nz/ChemProcesses/chem_processes.html

Be sure to download the pdfs to your local machine

http://www.filedropper.com/chemprocesses

abhijit116

Researchers at University of Glasgow have made chemical reaction vessels using 3d printing, integrating it with reactions, they have termed it as reactionware
http://www.nature.com/news/homegrown-labware-made-with-3d-printer-1.10453 , I think this is it! They used open source fabathome 3d printer. Full paper can be read by those who have access to the journal http://www.nature.com/nchem/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nchem.1313.html, Is this viable for OSE purposes?

joannee

i think that thi ill really be interesting. this will be pf great advantage and convenience to chemical engineers as this may mean smaller expenses to be able to buy part by part. i do hope that your idea will be worked at so that this may bring something new that is of benefit to our fellow chemists and chemical engineers.

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