Sadly this year's local Present Around The World event attracted fewer supporters than last year, to the extent that there was a degree of multi-tasking with the roles of organising and hosting with the judges and presenters!
Maurice opened the event by introducing the speakers and setting out the time constraints that they were to follow.
Esther was first up with “Valve Actuators – The Invisible Essentials”. She began by explaining the fundamental purposes of the valve – the 'tap' and the actuator – the 'hand' then quickly went on to describe many of the essential uses of valves in such areas as the water and chemical industries and the many means of operating them, e.g. electric, hydraulic or pneumatic, with hand operation retained for emergencies.
The reasons for having these different operating methods were explained, such as commonality with other equipment or mitigating hazards to or from the operating environment.
Clearly Esther had been enthused by her period of secondment to Rotork and had gained a comprehensive knowledge of the 'how and why' of their products as shown by her ability to handle questions from the supporters.
Rotork Controls
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As a student I had some knowledge of the Rotork range as we used it for studies on how to produce a useful classification scheme, the range being quite modular in some respects with common valve designs but with different sizes and interchangeable actuators. There are certainly more variations than one might expect at first.
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Next to present was Parimela and “Towards Sustainable Manufacturing of Pharmaceuticals”. She described how pharmaceutical products had been made by a two-stage batch process with the product exposed to a metal catalyst and then an enzyme before being recirculated over perhaps a 48 hour period until the process was complete.
She explained that it was important to achieve product purity as impurities led to side effects on patients. Impurities can be produced by each stage being contaminated by catalyst migrating from the other stage. If the catalysts could be held in place but put into a single stage then it would be possible to achieve a purer product but with a lower energy input.
The method that her research team had developed was to use wool whose surface proteins bonded well with the copper and enzyme catalysts that they were using. The wool was arranged on the surface of a spinning disc with the product being introduced towards the centre and collected for re-circulation at the periphery. This had been named the Spinning Mesh Disc Reactor.
It had been found that the technique worked best with higher spinning speeds and that the research work had proved that the concept had the potential to achieve the goals of improved purity and reduced energy input. The next step will be to develop it into a commercial process.
Device Puts New Spin on Enzyme Reactions
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I'm sure this presentation covered an area of engineering that few of us are familiar with. Many of us have had some experience of chemistry at school where the reactants are chosen for convenience and safety. The world of chemical engineering can be quite different, the waste product of one process forming the feedstock for another for instance. Pharmaceutical engineering takes this a step further with its stringent requirements, relatively small scale production but high safety standards.
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Completing the session was Sam with "Striving for Efficiency Within Health and Safety Compliance". He described how his company had a requirement to provide a Health and Safety package to Network Rail at the completion of each project. This file provided the information that might be needed to support the maintenance of the project and any subsequent works in a safe fashion. It included information such as the location of buried works and interfaces with other systems. Consequently the package included many files and a lot of work to assemble it. In one recent project it had taken two people two years to complete the task. Because of the methodical and co-ordinated approach required it would be difficult to employ more people on this task.
Sam told us that he realised that this task seemed to have some scope for automation and he set out to develop a tool using VBA macros within an Excel spreadsheet. He gave us some insight into the learning that he had had to undertake and some of the lessons that he had learned.
He provided us with a copy of the tool's instruction manual and briefly explained how data was put into the tool and the assembly process defined. Using the tool he had been able to assemble 1600 files in six minutes. The tool had been well received and he expected its use to be validated following the completion of a current signalling project.
Siemens Rail Health & Safety
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Documentation packages have become a way of life for the working engineer nowadays and it is clearly desirable that there should be a systematic and consistent method of assembling them so it would be interesting to see if this tool can have wider application, especially given the flexible way in which it can be tasked.
While much of engineering is team-based it is good to see a young engineer get to run his own project as it can be a valuable learning experience with all aspects of the project having to be scoped, managed and executed.
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This year gave us three very competent presenters describing three quite different personal involvements, ranging through describing the work of others, the work of the team and the work of the individual, all of which embraces the world of the engineer.
As usual “there can only be one winner” and this time it was Parimela, well done (everyone)!
