I treat my body like a distillation column... My personal physician looks at me like I am a distillation column. Dr. Dianne English worked as a chemical engineer for about five years before attending and completing medical school. As an engineer, she worked for Champlin and Conoco-Phillips ? and visited some of the same processing units that I did early during my career. Our conversations are in a language that chemical engineers only half understand, and that nurses only half understand. In fact, our conversations are so unsettling to nurses that they sometimes leave the examining room ? pretending to be needed at some non-existent emergencies. Dr. English calls me in for examinations about every six months; she calls them ?troubleshoots.? Her examination room contains human body PFD?s. I offered her an distillation unit PFD, but she thought I was kidding. She believes that mass must balance. If I eat too much, and if I ride my bike too little, I accumulate mass. She also believes in heat balances. When I accumulate heat, it shows up as a fever. 37�C is my temperature target (98.6�F for the U.S. readers). My heart is the reflux pump. My blood is the reflux. Blood carries oxygen. Reflux carries clean light compounds. Valves seem to be everywhere ? in the heart, in the circulatory system and all across the distillation unit. As of now, all of my personal valves are the ones I was born with. If Dr.English ever tries to replace my aortic valve with a pig valve, I will test the pig valve in the reflux line first. The first step in a good distillation troubleshoot is the measurement and analysis of the column?s pressure drop ? 0.1 psi/tray is a typical target value. On distillation columns, there are no high/low systolic/diastolic readings ?unless the reflux pump is cavitating wildly. On the human body, 120 and 80 are the target values, unless the heart muscle is fibrillating. The combustion reaction that occurs when natural gas is burned in the steam-generating boiler is remarkably like the human metabolism reaction. Fuel plus oxygen in the presence of a catalyst yields carbon dioxide and water and energy. Too bad that the fuel that humans consume is not as cheap as natural gas right now. The cooling tower removes heat from the distillation unit, even when birds form nests in the old filler sheets. Similarly, perspiration keeps body temperatures from exceeding 37�C. Filters trap out rust in the cooling water systems. The kidneys are the human filters. The control room is the brain of the distillation unit, with electrical signals continuously being received and sent. After my most recent physical examination, I asked Dr. English a question that was on my mind since the first time I met her in 2008, ?Are distillation columns girls or boys?? After due deliberation, she answered, ?Distillation columns can be difficult, temperamental, perplexing and unpredictable? they must be boys...
Posted on: Wed, 11 Sep 2013 13:47:37 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015