Those of you who read my entries from a year ago will have been introduced to the wonderful UK chemical engineering event that is Frank Morton. For those who were less fortunate and have not been informed of this wonderful day then I am obliged to take this time and go through it all again!
FM2007 is going to be held next week with the University of Manchester Dept of Chem Eng as our hosts. This is basically a sports day for chemical engineers in university and industry that culminates in a seriously large night out! It's not only a great opportunity to represent your department's sporting faculties, but also allows you to get one over rival departments or future employers! In essence, it's great fun that tends to end with a large headache!
I am, at this moment in time, unaware to what I will be competing in apart from the drinking! What I must be careful of, however, is that the following day I have an important presentation for my final year project, followed by the report hand-in the following day! So, I will have to tackle the usual student challenge of the work-party trade-off!
The plan is to leave our uni at around 5 am armed with crates of beer ready for the start of the events at around 11. We arrive back at uni around 7 am the following morning. For any of you who take up chemical engineering in the UK then I strongly urge you to attend at least one of these events in your time: it doesn't matter if you're not sporty or a drinker as it's just a great, fun day! Anyway, read in a fortnight where i'll debrief you all on how we got on.
After the headaches (and heartaches!) of sitting my final exams the second semeser has finally arrived. If you don't recall, the assessment over this 12 weeks is not examination based, instead it is comprised of 2 projects: Product Design and a Design Project.
Product Design is a 4 week group project that requires teams of students to develop novel ideas for new technologies or improvements to current technologies. Examples of the types of products that are investigated include catalysts for lean burn engines, artificial hearts and kidneys, self-cooling drink cans, controlled drug delivery, washing detergent tablets with controlled release of active ingredients, convenience food machines, amongst others.
Our group has decided to investigate methods to design a freezer unit to display and store ice creams that are purchased on "impulse". This term impulse is important to bear in mind. Impulse purchases are where you would walk into a shop on a whim and buy a single unit of product. Take for instance a can of soft drink: you would walk into the store and buy a single unit from the fridge. This would be that same but for ice cream, i.e. only considering single item purchases instead of boxes or tubs of ice cream.
If you were to walk into a convenience store today then the display and storage of "impulse" ice creams are in freezer chests with sliding doors on the top. The problem with these is that they fail to make the product look inviting, are energy inefficient, and contain CFC (or possibly HFC) refrigerants. This means they are environmentally-unfriendly. Our design brief is thus, to develop a storage vessel that is environmentally-friendly, energy efficient, and displays the poduct in a inviting manner.
So, the stopwatch has started with little over 3 weeks remaining. This, according to my predecessors, is one of the longest 4 weeks of your life. I'd best stock up on plenty of coffee and biscuits then as this is going to be a long-haul!
