Holmlid

I just started my internship in the Carngello chemical engineering lab today. The project Ill be helping with (at least, to start) is designing catalysts for Partial Methane Oxidation or PMO. The PMO process is used to convert methane gas (CH4, commonly referred to as natural gas) into methanol (CH3OH, also known as wood alcohol). Methane has found... widespread use as a heating gas, but it has two properties that make it unfavourable. The first is that, as a gas with a very low boiling point, it takes a great deal of energy to transport it. To transport it as a gas requires very large vessels, and to hold any appreciable quantity of methane also requires the gas to be pressurized. The more you pressurize it, the more you can store in a container of the same volume (up until it becomes a liquid); however, this also increases the amount of energy you need to expend (pressurization can take up to xx% of the energy you get from burning the methane) and requires thicker containers to hold it (not to mention an increased risk of explosion). In the end, you get ships that look like this designed for transporting methane: I mentioned previously that Ill be trying to use a scintillation counter/cosmic ray detector to measure the high-energy charged particles that are supposedly emitted by ultra-dense deuterium. In this post, I want to describe how a cosmic ray detector works, and how I plan to build one. The first thing to note is that cosmic rays (which you can read about in more detail on Wikipedia ) are a type of ionizing radiation produced when high-energy particles collide with the Earths atmosphere. Cosmic rays can be composed of a number of different types of particles, ranging from electrons to heavy nuclei cores, but are predominantly muons, which are heavier analogues of electrons. These muons can interact with a detector in multiple ways. In a bubble chamber, the muon ionizes atoms in a tank of super-heated liquid hydrogen, causing it to boil along the trail traversed by the particle, and leaving a visible ...Read More