Mist stack CO2 scrubber designed already!

Further to my description of a stack CO2 capture device I discovered a mist trap for smoke stacks has actually been patented. Being in 1972 the patent is no longer active and it was mainly meant for other types of pollution - particularly particulates. However it would catch CO2 as well. I find it highly ironic that we care most about controlling the most benign item coming out of a smoke stack but never mind.

Anyway, it's pretty much the design I had in mind. I suppose none were ever actually built. Instead of simple mist it creates high density fog, presumably because of the temperature of the flue gas. You are helped of course by the fact that the flue gas contains a lot of water vapour too. All you have to do is supersaturate and drain the liquid. Shouldn't cost very much should it? It might even cost less than a traditional tall stack. All this fuss about a simple engineering problem!

11-Pollution-sensor; 12-Elbow; 13-Roof; 14-Building; 15-Legs; 16-Conical body; 17-Pollution sensor; 18-High pressure water line; 19-Multiple nozzles; 20-Catch basin; 21-Drain; 22-Short stack; 23-Pollution sensor; 24-Baffles

Looks nice!

Found here http://www.freepatentsonline.com/3668841.html. 

Well done Howard R. Nunn of Napa California. You beat me by 40 years! I wonder if he's still alive? In homage I'm going to call it the "Nunn Foggy Scrubber".

Now I'll just get this into a 3d model when I have the time!

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Selling a new product

This is a short distillation of stuff I'm trying to ensure I do as I launch a new product.

How to Sell (adapted):
1. Know your customer. Understand his personal (secondary) buying motive. ie what he really seeks from the product or service. Ask questions and listen to the answers.
2. Sell the features, advantages and benefits that relate to what the customer wants.
3. Be aware of the psychological steps that buyers go through and how to deal with them.
4. You need a) Empathy, so that you can understand customer needs. b) Confidence, so that your can bring customers to the point of buying, and c) Resilience, so that you can use rejection and temporary setbacks as spurs that constantly move you forward
5. Be honest and available. Sales are about relationships and relationships are about trust.
6. Plan for the possible objections.
7. Make it easy to buy.


Some of this doesn't relate to me but perhaps more to the website or the product. I am a stickler for simplicity. When it's simple it's usable and has less trouble. For usability it needs to be lightweight, with few options all of which are labelled clearly. To some extent this is a carry over from designing tools offshore. I listened to the complaints about existing tools, agreed they were indeed correct, noticed where they could be designed a lot better and made sure my own products did not have the same defects. It's most gratifying when the users of the tools say something like "this tool is a heck of a lot better than the last one we had".


I'm aware of course that others like complications but I'm thinking they are the kind of people who will buy the big name products, where you might know what you want but you can't a) find it in the interface, b) use it after you found it because you didn't do 3 or 4 previous steps correctly. If you don't know what I'm talking about then you clearly haven't used Ansys Workbench!


Now the reason some buyers/users value complexity is presumably the assumption that they are getting more bang for their buck. So if the buck is less maybe that would overcome that difficulty.


Then of course you get into the canard of "you get what you pay for". Well there is no way around that other than to target your audience. People may criticize Alibre for price reductions, just like they criticize Ryanair for cheap flights but if the sales are there then clearly it's just snobs or vested interests who are worried about buying something cheaper. Most of us here in France just love Ryanair because they provide a service that is convenient, unique, quick and fair. Their separations of the charges are a pain but clearly they are used to bring customers in the door. I think that's what I'm aiming for. The pricing issue is a problem that will sort itself out only by testing, in the way that Alibre just did. Having added 10,000 users at 100 dollars a piece it was an interesting million dollar gain as well as an experiment.

It should also be robust. Two things I made sure of with FEMdesigner after bad experience with other FE software were a) Keep a readable text file because binaries get corrupted easily, and b) if it ever crashes make sure these files are not affected. Potential crashes can be found by beta testing. What I'm discovering - the biggest headache - is that these crashes come almost exclusively from 3rd party issues so I'm trying to keep it simple regarding using the graphics card, threading and the like. Anything too new or controversial will fail. Currently I'm sorting out a deadlocking problem because I need a worker thread to overlay my plots on the host viewport but if the user or the operating system causes a refresh message on the other thread then everything freezes. It took me a while to discover that one and I've still only half-fixed it.


Update - fixed it: Confucius he says "Use too many threads and deadlock is your downfall".

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CO2 capture device

Now I was just musing about the SO2 scrubbers that were used to prevent acid rain. We retrofitted them to power station stacks and now the problem is no more. Actually whether it was a problem in the first place is debatable - according to Bjorn Lomberg's book "the skeptical environmentalist" it wasn't - but let's gloss over that. Are we presuming that a similar thing can't be done with CO2? Because if we are then it doesn't make much sense to me. When air capture is mentioned at all then they always assume it should be in the form of artificial trees. See here for the most promising one of these:

http://www.earthinstitute.columbia.edu/articles/view/2523

Now Lackner got his idea first from a fishtank scrubber and then from a leaf. However he forgot the most efficient natural scrubber of the lot - rainwater. Yes CO2 indeed easily dissolves in rainwater to form carbonic acid. In fact though Lackners idea uses this mechanism to collect the CO2 from the ion-exchange mechanism. Why did he use an ion-exchange mechanism? - because he is simulating a tree. Why is he simulating a tree? - because he is capturing CO2 from the air. Why is he capturing CO2 from the air rather than from chimney stacks? - lord alone knows, it seems dumb to me!

So in summary - and if anyone wants to fund me in this planet saving mission my email is jg@femdesigner.com

a) skip the dumb tree idea and go straight to the power station stacks exactly as with the SO2 scrubbers,
b) put in a 90 degree bend and add a fine mist spray in the corner, like the type that sprays mist on lettuces in my local supermarket,
c) drain off the carbonic acid and the wet soot from the bend corner,
d) pipe the liquid to an algae farm or a greenhouse. Be sure to use gravity rather than a pump.

Now how much would that cost? Peanuts? A working prototype is worth 25 million from Richard Branson. Alas the idea is now officially out in the public domain (ie here) so you can't patent it! Ha ha!

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unequivocal warming, but not unequivocally human

Interesting quote from Andy Revkin buried deep in his comments section at dotearth:


////quote
There's utter logic in concluding that if there is, as the IPCC concluded, 90-percent confidence that more than half of recent warming is greenhouse-driven, that implies a substantially higher level of confidence (well up toward, if not precisely 100 percent) exists that some greenhouse warming is under way.

But the IPCC -- outside of the questionable line in this chapter -- never stated there was no doubt about human-driven warming. Again, that doesn't mean there's no doubt, given the breadth of evidence. It just means they never formally said it.

I actually had prolonged discussions with both Susan Solomon and Michael Oppenheimer of the IPCC about this after some IPCC authors expressed concern over that very phrase in an update we ran on the latest climate science just before Copenhagen. http://j.mp/noCO2doubt

Using that logic, I wrote that the panel “...concluded that no doubt remained that human-caused warming was under way and that, if unabated, it would pose rising risks.”

They both disagreed:

Dr. Oppenheimer: "The 'no doubt' or 'unequivocal' refers only to the warming part, not the human-caused part."

Dr. Solomon: "This could be true but it's not something that we said."


////endquote


Time they reminded some of their colleagues and disciples who regularly use that phrase cavalierly.  The trouble is, the fact of warming does not suggest the cause of it. The warming of the last century though has been a linear trend with fluctuations. We think we know the fluctuations are down to ocean cycles but the trend is not so easy. It could be just another long term fluctuation - as suggested by Avery and Singer in their book "Unstoppable warming every 1500 years". Certainly if 50% of it was natural last century and the trend in the 2nd part is the same as in the first part then the rest of it has a good chance of being natural too, in the form of a natural recovery from the little ice age. The idea that it was manmade was based on a false assumption that we could tease out the natural component from 1985 to 2000 so what was left must be man-made warming. It was a ridiculously optimistic or misleading idea - no doubt entirely to influence policy. The significant pause in recent warming put paid to the idea that natural fluctuations were predictable on these shorter timescales. So to really answer the question of what caused the warming, we really need to first ask the questions a)- what caused the little ice age, and b) what caused the medieval warm period before it, because these were 100% natural and seem to have been global. When we know that long-term natural component then we can tease out the manmade contribution and not before. 


Of course several solar theorists have said the long term trend seems to match solar activity. One that springs to mind was Scaffeta and West who compared solar reconstructions with Moberg's proxy reconstruction. A bit iffy mind you but interesting. The exchange between Scaffeta and Rasmus on realclimate.org was quite entertaining. To me Scaffetta won on points and Rasmus gave up. It didn't help that he got the Stefan-Boltzmann equation wrong; somewhat of a howler for a man in his position. Neither did it help that he was pretending that the now utterly discredited and even disowned hockey-stick reconstructions were better than Mobergs effort.  Nor that his main defense for that was the utterly illogical canard that if natural variation proved large then that is even more reason to worry about CO2 rises.

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Science as a blunt instrument

No doubt anyone who's followed the debates on global warming that occur on the blogosphere have noticed the reference to tobacco industry scientific studies and in particular that S. Fred Singer and perhaps a few others were involved in downcrying the science that second hand smoke causes cancer. What I'm wondering though is why anyone needed a scientific report to call on any ban for smoking? As I just read a lawyer repeating, "my right to swing my fist ends just before it touches your nose". Well substitute blowing smoke for swinging fists and you have all the justification you need. For all the blather that selfish smokers make about society impinging on their liberties they don't ever consider for one second that us non-smokers find smoke offensive and that our right to not breath their pollution far outweighs their rights to do it. The case is this simple; you can smoke as much as you like as long as you don't blow any over anyone else. It doesn't even matter whether it causes cancer or not, the mere fact that it is disgusting is sufficient reason to send the buggers outside.

A similar report was recently released on the health effects of Diesel. Apparently long distance lorry drivers are showing certain signs of something or other. This is no doubt another effort to undermine fossil fuel use in some way. That I saw it on the green car congress blog confirms the audience for this stuff. But again it wasn't necessary because everyone agrees that diesel smoke and soot is particularly disgusting and I'd have thought pedestrians are more at risk than anyone. So who needs a report? Answer - absolutely nobody. People get bogged down arguing on scientific reports that show spurious correlations and talk about statistical significance (a phrase that should be outlawed in my opinion) in order to invoke some health law. Yet they don't need that - they can turn to civil liberties laws instead.

And of course the upshot is that even smokers prefer to be in a smoke free environment. This is why they blow it out so far in the first place. Now that discos have become smoke free zones, my smoking friends remark that it's much more pleasant and they are quite happy to go outside to prevent the inside getting smoky.

I guess I'm particularly cranky about smoke because one of these 2000 poisons gives me a migraine from time to time. It took me a while to narrow it down to smoke but then I narrowed it down even further to US cigarettes. Ah the US free market economy - allows you to consume all the junk you like and a lot more you didn't know about! Have some growth hormones with that steak won't you? By the way, did anybody ever tell you you're beginning to resemble a bullock? What happened to the science that investigated that anyway? Maybe the entire grant went towards investigating truckers lungs. Or maybe the fossil fuel industry is fair game but the food industry gets a free ride for some reason.

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Insourcing; think about it!

There was an interesting segment on French TV last night. Apparently some companies who had outsourced their labour to foreign countries were scuttling back after it all went wrong. Both companies featured complained about the lower quality costing them customers and the first explained that the cheap labour cost in Roumania wasn't all it seemed: ie Although the cost in France was 30 euros per hour versus 6, there were hidden costs, such as low productivity, transport, more management staff, etc that put the full Roumanian cost at 36 euros per worker. These were all things they just hadn't thought of. Meantime the manufacturer who'd gone to China complained about only having two colour options - both gray - and the hand-finishing causing fit-up problems. As Jeremy Clarkson would say, "hand-built is just another way of saying the door won't shut right", which is fair comment on metal objects at least. A 3rd businessman made an all-out effort to have a made in France label as a matter of pride. Let's face it a prestige manufacturer with a made in China label is just not possible. But in order to do that he needed to squeeze his suppliers. Well there's no better time than a crisis to try that. We need to take risks and make strong partnerships to survive. The Japanese though used to pay extra to ensure good suppliers but it's changed days now. I'll bet they are feeling the Chinese bite too.

Contrast this with the Ross Perot/Al Gore encounter about NAFTA where Perot correctly predicted all jobs would go South and Al disagreed. Well besides the jobs argument, just how much of the collapse of the US car industry is down to poor quality? Customers are difficult to get and even more difficult to get back when they've been let down. Short-termist thinking needs to be rooted out of managers heads. The best way to do that is probably to put engineers in charge :) like they do in France, Germany, Japan and China. France wavered a bit with US hire-em-fire-em ideas but the law stopped them and Germany had a short-lived experiment with US management but this crash has ended all that. Now they know they were right all this time.

The car industry is my benchmark for business generally and it seems that they survive due to protectionism, national pride in engineering, good management and single-union, no-strike deals. If Japanese manufacturers can manage to build and sell quality cars in the US and UK then clearly the idea that unions or workers were to blame for a car industry closure is a total red herring: It is perforce the management at fault. And that is from making decisions on a short-term quarterly return basis rather than thinking about long-term customer satisfaction. Blindly outsourcing your product is a perfect example that will come back to haunt many. Sadly on their return, one of the French manufacturers discovered that the workforce they'd abandoned had moved on and there was a shortage of skills necessary to run the machinery.

Finally I read a lot of whining from US and UK fund managers about European work hours and regulations that stop you firing people on a whim. But when it's easy to fire people, what kind of workers do you get? Answer: ones who won't tell you when you are wrong. And if it's easy to get people to work long hours routinely then are you getting the best work done in the best way - or are you getting a horses arse of a job produced by an overtired, overstressed worker? If you've ever worked in the oil industry you'll know the latter is the case.

There should be a compromise position and I for a while thought that the UK employment laws were best in that respect; reasonable protections, no impediments to startup. However for some reason it doesn't work as well as you'd think. Why? Well I've found that the worst problem in the UK is late payment. I'm pretty sure that's what kills most businesses and I'm also sure that's the intention of the accountants who keep this practice up. It goes like this; get the job done from small supplier on credit, refuse to pay, supplier goes out of business, ergo no need to pay. Even government departments practice this. My own uncle was forced out of business when after he'd done a lot of work for the local council, the Labour party decided to abolish county councils and replace them with regional councils instead. The old council couldn't pay and the new one said it was not their bill. Many, many businesses were lost in the same way because the only redress was via expensive court proceedings. Don't tell me that the Labour party is about workers. A whole bunch of accountants should be in jail for that scam. Of course any excuse works for late payment and if you've done the job already then you are shafted.

So if you are starting a small business in the UK the lesson is clear: NO CREDIT EVER. Personally I'm quite insulted when a company sends a purchase order. It's so second nature to them that they don't seem to even realize they are actually rudely assuming that I'll give them credit rather than politely asking for it. If someone ever tries that one on then send a pro-forma invoice and explain in clear terms that you don't ever give credit, because of bad experiences with late payers. That way they might actually realize that they've been begging for credit like a street urchin while pretending to be a world class company. They'll whine about their systems not being set up for that but it's all just toss. Be firm and you'll discover they can pay up front very easily when they feel like it!

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