Dr Bokana's Blog 1: Walao why must we do ICPD

Hello my beautiful blog enthusiast.

On the first day when I heard of the short form ICPD, I genuinely thought that it was Intro to Chemical Plant Design. Expecting to learn how pumps and pipes were designed, when Mr Chua, my module lecturer, said we are supposed make a prototype of a chemical product. I was like this guy got to be kidding me, there is no way I came to Singapore Polytechnic (SP), ESPECIALLY while studying the PRESTIGIOUS subject of CHEMCIAL ENGINEERING, to design some idiotic prototype as my final year project. Not to mention the fact, I am the neither artistic nor creative in any way.

Talking about chemical products, it is not as what you would imagine. Everyone would think that chemical products was related to chemical reactions like medicine, drugs, vaccines or maybe even viruses, but in actuality a chemical product does not have to be so complicated. Majority of our household items are chemical products, a coffee machine is a chemical product, even your a measly lighter is considered a chemical product.

So what makes something a chemical product? 

• Any product that is designed and/or manufactured using chemical engineering principles.

Not everyone is aware of what chemical engineering principles are;

Examples of chemical engineering principles are

• Fluid flow 
• Heat Transfer
• Mass Transfer
• Reactions
• Thermodynamics

So from all the details provided above, we know what a chemical product is. Does this not make you ponder on the number chemical products that already exist and how many in the process of being made.

Fortunately, for simplicity sake there are categories for the numerous chemical products present.

Chemical Product Categories

• Commodities 
• Molecular Products
• Micro-Structured Products
• Chemical Devices

Let me briefly example what these categories are, 

Commodities are know as the traditional focus of chemical engineering. So what in the world are chemical product commodities? Lets start with the definition; A mass-produced product, that is easily obtainable. Hence the name, these chemical products, like the definition, are mass produced and  are non-differentiable amongst competitors. Since all the products look similar, how does one have a competitive advantage? PRICE!! The cheaper the product the more attractive it seems to the customer and to have a low marked price, the cost price must be low. To have a low cost price, production EFFICIENCY is the key making it the main engineering challenge of producing commodities.

Next we have Molecular Products, As the name suggests, they possess specific chemical structures which carefully designed to perform a particular task . These products are usually created due to immense research and experimentation, for example pharmaceutically produced drugs. Usually these molecular products are sold at a significantly higher price compared to its production cost. However, most tend forget about the amount time, effort & money that was invest in discovering these products causing them to be sold at much higher prices. 

Thirdly we have Micro Structured Products, Unlike Molecular Products, micro structured products are not constructed on a molecular level. These products are usually on the scale of micrometers, typically lesser than 100 µm. µm is known as micrometers or 10-6 m. These products are specifically designed for the customers psychological satisfaction, and as us humans are complex creatures with multiple preferences converting the consumers needs into something measurable is the biggest hurdle when designing the product. Examples of such factors would the creamy texture of an ice cream, certain people prefer soft serve and others do not. 

Moving on to the last category, Chemical Devices Wait does Chemical Device not sound similar to Chemical Products? DO NOT be mistaken Chemical Devices are only a subsection of the various types of Chemical Products. Chemical Devices a go through multiple miniature processes to produce a certain chemical transformation. Usually these devices are made for convenience sake. For example, household appliances like a coffee maker. (PS the coffee maker is an important factor later on)

Now that I have briefly explained what Chemical Products are and its categories as taught in the lecture, allow me to side track a little and talk about the activities that my group and I had to do in the name of team bonding on the first lesson. 

Before choosing our group members we were told to use the Tuckerman's teams formation model to properly select members who are aspiring to do well in this module. The Tuckerman's model has 5 stages which gives a good gauge on evaluating people before choosing them.

5 stages of Bruce Tuckerman's model

• Forming
• Storming
• Norming
• Performing
• Adjourning

In the class I have my own clique, which consist of 5 members. However, Mr Chua had mentioned that every group should only have maximum 4 members, so we spilt up into 2s and 3s. My group was the group which had 3 of my clique members; Anna, Yan Zhen & myself and our final member is this miracle of a person called Dylan. Once everyone had formed into their groups, we had noticed something that we had never thought would happen. There was a group were which only had the freeloaders of the class. This was indeed and dream come true, everyone else in class ,regardless of their abilities, tries to put in effort even if they are unsure of what they are doing but these buggers tend to do nothing at all and feel no guilt in doing this whatsoever. Putting them in a group together allows them to taste their own medicine after causing the 2 semesters of torment that my beloved classmates had to endure. W BOYS & girls

So for the team bonding, we had to do 5 tasks as a team. Contemplating on what a burden this module is going to be I had misheard the instructions and thought that we had to only do one activity. So my group & I had headed down to Food Court 1 and decided to try out the famous waffle ice cream together as a group. It has been more than one year since I have been in SP but I had yet to try it, so why not take this opportunity to use precious class time and waste it on eating food. It is always a students dream to having a lecturer where you can enjoy doing leisure things. 

Not going to lie, I was very excited on how good it would be. However, it was pretty anti-climatic and I had overestimated on the quality of ice cream. I mean what can I expect for 5 dollar, am I right ? It was a pretty big serving as well, the stall owner had given us 3 scoops of ice cream and the waffle was bigger and thicker than the usual waffles sold outside. It was just that the ice cream quality was not up to cafe standard but nonetheless tasty. Because of this we named ourself, WAFFLE GELATO😁😁

This is my beloved group mates and us trying to make funny faces to look like we are having more fun. The best part is we took our time to finish the ice cream and ended up coming late to class.

 (End of Tidbit)

Week 2

When is comes to thinking of an Chemical Product to design an important factor to consider is Needs Identification. And to simplify understanding Needs Identification, there are 4 key stages that we need to take to ensure that there is some sieving of ideas before finally deciding on the idea we want to work on. 

So what are the 4 key steps:

Stage 1- Identifying Customer Needs

Stage 2 - Establish Ideas

Stage 3 - Refine Ideas 

Stage 4 - Develop & plan Project

It is essentially to follow these steps in ascending order and to not skip any steps to ensure maximum evaluation for the final selection.

Stage 1- Identifying Customer Needs

The whole reason why we are producing this Chemical Product is to satisfy the requirements specify target audience. Therefore we need identify what are the needs of customers which could possibly govern our Chemical Product design process.

Stage 2 - Establish Ideas

Once we have identified the needs that that is governing our Chemical Product, we need to think of possible inventions we can solve these needs and meet the consumers expectations and requirements. It would be preferable to make a list of possible ideas and not just fixate on one idea from the start.

Stage 3 - Refine Ideas

After making a list of possible products, sieve through all the ideas and consider the plausibility the idea and how attractive it seems to the consumer. At the end, select one idea which is practical and attractive and work around any improvements

Stage 4 - Develop & Plan Project

Lastly, think of the Chemical Engineering Principles that are applied in the product and develop your idea to make it a reality. Do also try producing prototypes as it allows us to test if the product is good idea.

We have talked about Needs Identification. But after all these idea formulation, we need to identify the flaws in our design. One way to do so is by identifying pain points within our product.

So what are pain points?

• Specific problems experienced by the user while use a product or a service

Pain points are very dangerous, they can seem as hassles to the consumer and may even lead to the customer abandoning your product or service. As pain points can occur in various occasions it is important to identify and solve them as effectively as possible.

Common type of Pain Points:

• Interaction

- Long waiting time for customer service

- Limited range of communication channels

- Conflicting or inaccurate support messaging

• Purchasing

- Confusion about payment methods

- Lack of security

- Issues with pricing transparency

• Compatibility

- Lack of support of operating systems for certain devices

- Failure to offer consistent cross platform performance

• Functionality

- Outdated features

- Glitches and bugs

- Lack of features

When trying to identify pain points, think of our own experience when using a certain product or service.  Use these guiding questions to ease the thinking process.

• Which part of the product makes you feel annoyed?  
• Which part of this service makes you feel like replacing it? 

However, only the consumers can answer what is truly going on in their mind. And one way to find out is to give them a portal for them to share their opinions and constructive criticism. 

Methods of identifying Pain Points

• Online Survey 
• Live chat 
• Online Reviews
• Customer Interview
• Customer Support Tickets
• Sales Calls
• Social Media Threads 

It is also important to know that not everyone is comfortable with criticizing others and to get their honest opinions we can provide some prompting questions to the customers

• How often do you use our product/service?
• What would you change about our product/service?
• Favorite feature of our product/service
• Least favorite feature of our product
• Would recommend this product to others?
• What prevents you from enjoying our product?

For this week, we participated in an activity that helped us identify what type of Chemical Engineering Principles are applied in certain chemical products. Firstly, we had to choose one of the broad categories and one of the subdivisions in the photo below. 

Once we had done so, we had to think of an appliance which falls into the descriptions of the 2 chosen categories and identify the type of Chemical Engineering Principles which were used when the appliance was functioning. One of the appliance we had thought of was an air purifier, it falls within household & medical and wellness equipment and the Chemical Engineering Principle it used was mass transfer. The dirt particles are extracted through a membrane filter and the air in the outlet is purified air containing lesser dirt particles compared to the initial air entering the purifier. At the end, we had to link back to the theory taught by allocating our appliance to one of Chemical Product categories and the air purifier fell into the Chemical Devices.

(End of Tidbit)

Week 3

Knowing the preferences of the consumers should be the last thing to take into consideration before actually starting production. Before that proper research is required for us to bring our idea to live and the only way to do so is by referring to literatures such as books and articles. Lets talk about the importance of reviews academics literatures.

What is Literature Review?

• Surveying and analyzing of literatures that are related to the theories and concepts relating to your research area.

The main purpose of literature review is to examine any relevant sources and to provide a critical evaluation and a brief summary of them. This allows us to clarify any doubts that we have and shows us the possible limitations we could face when making our prototype. When reviewing different academic papers from different scholar we also can see the difference in thinking process and compare the area of controversy between them.

So what is the importance of Literature Review,

• Allows us to assess the current state of our research
• Allows us to see which researchers have written the most on the relevant topic
• Helps identify key questions that need to answered before further research
• Prevents plagiarism and allows us to give due diligence to the rightful author

So how do you know if your literature review is good? When choosing articles to compare ensure that that they are relevant and are from a reliable source. The contents of the articles must lay a strong foundation for your research. Some articles contain irrelevant information which do not relate to your topic, you should sieve out only relevant details from these articles before comparing with other sources. This is because the redundant information can cloud your judgment when choosing which sources are reliable. However, the contents of the source should have a certain amount of information on the research you are conducting. Lastly, when comparing the sources they should have a balance or supporting and opposing arguments. Once all of the steps are covered, then and only then will you have a literature review worthy to be used for your research.

Now time for the side tracking, this week we had our first ICPD practical, we had different grouping from the lectures. We were told to have an open mind and to absorb as much information as we could on reverse engineering. We were told that the object for this practical was to open up an coffee maker (as I said before). I was like 'WHAT??' please do NOT say that we are going to waste three hours just on opening a bloody coffee maker. This has nothing to do with Chemical Engineering. Regardless of what I thought, it was still better than sitting in class learning about product selection. 

AM I RIGHT ??!! 

But before that, there was a display set given to us for us to produce a coffee sample, this gave us a brief idea on the Chemical Engineering Principle of the coffee maker. Once we finished that we headed on to breaking the coffee maker apart. It was a very simple design, making the dismantling a fairly simple processes. After broken apart, there were these 2 orange tubing that we were told to examine. One of the tubes was completely hollow while the other tube has a metal ball-like structure. I was curious what the metal ball was, so I went ahead to ask Mr Chua. Instead of telling me what it was, he told my group to test out pouring water from both sides of the tube with the metal ball. 

One side of the tube the flow was constant but the other side the flow was somewhat restricted, I was like how even? why is only one side restricted?, what purpose does it serve? To someone as simple minded as me, it seemed very useless. Who would have known something that small would be a check valve. Even though it did not full serve it purpose but prevent flow on one side completely, it closes resembled one but due to years and years of being taken apart and ware & tear if lost its function. 

Wait WOAH, a check valve in a coffee machine? No way right! Why would something used in a pilot plant be in a measly coffee machine? These questions made me think of all the other possibility of chemical engineering being applied in simple everyday items. Not going to lie, this was the major break through that totally changed my idea of ICPD and it kinda enriched my brain and made look forward for future practicals and lectures.

For the second part of practical, we tested out another application used in the coffee machine. We were given a brief summary on the working principle of the air pump. As said in the summary how an air pump works is that it compresses air and produced flow for the air to travel.

After that we were told to experiment on how the air pump affects water flowrate. We were provided a 5 litre water jug, air pump, a secondary containment to prevent spillages, a transparent tube called the U-tube, a small jug to collect water flowing, stopwatch and a retort stand. So how this experiment works is that the air pump is connected to the U-tube which is submerged in the jug filled with water. As the pump produces flow for the air to travel and as air has a much lower density than water, it forces the water present in the U-tube to travel upwards and flow out.

The point of the experiment is to test out the different flowrates and the way to adjust it is to apply the knowledge of Submergence Ratio. Submergence ratio is the ratio of submergence length, the length of the U-tube underwater to the total length of the U-tube.  

To start the experiment, we used a basis of one minute to calculate the flowrate. We tested out 3 different sets of ratios and compared the difference in flowrate, there was a certain trend noticed. As length of the U-tube submerged increases, the submergence ratio increases. And as submergence ratio  increases the water flowrate also increases. Therefore, making submergence ratio directly proportional to the water flowrate

This applied back to the coffee machine, as the more water is added the so called 'U-tube' in the tank will be submerged more and the air pump will cause the water to flow out faster making coffee production more efficient.

Such simples things having such complex mechanisms behind them makes my small & dense mind ponder how else Chemical Engineering could be applied into daily life. There is no way in hell am I ever going to despise a ICPD lesson.

(End of Tidbit)

Pictures of me and my gorgeous classmates :0 

Thank you for reading my first blog. MUAH XOXO😘