Sean Moran's Blog, page 23
February 23, 2018
Water and Wastewater Treatment Plant Engineering Expert Witness, Author, Professor
Expert witness work continues, as does the real engineering. I've been doing nitty-gritty detailed design this week of a system for treatment of a complex chemical wastewater arising from a commercial lab.
Proofing is officially finished for the new book, ("An Applied Guide to Water and Effluent Treatment Plant Design") but we do like to get all of the details right. I have reviewed books let down by a less than obsessive attention to layout and drawings, and it doesn't take that much of it to really spoil a book. No-one can care about this as much as a committed author does. I like it just how I want it, which leads to some extended correspondence with the publisher, but it is in everyone's interest to product a quality product...
My Chester students are going to submit their designs to me next week. They are using my first book as their set text, and they are producing lots of interesting questions whose answers will be incorporated into the second edition of An Applied Guide to Process and Plant Design, which will be my next book...
Proofing is officially finished for the new book, ("An Applied Guide to Water and Effluent Treatment Plant Design") but we do like to get all of the details right. I have reviewed books let down by a less than obsessive attention to layout and drawings, and it doesn't take that much of it to really spoil a book. No-one can care about this as much as a committed author does. I like it just how I want it, which leads to some extended correspondence with the publisher, but it is in everyone's interest to product a quality product...
My Chester students are going to submit their designs to me next week. They are using my first book as their set text, and they are producing lots of interesting questions whose answers will be incorporated into the second edition of An Applied Guide to Process and Plant Design, which will be my next book...
December 12, 2017
December 2, 2016
Process Plant Layout is in the shops
My new book, "Process Plant Layout" is available now via the publisher's site as well as (more expensively ) on Amazon.co.uk
October 1, 2016
Final Preparations
Proofreading is complete for Process Plant Layout though I will check over all of the amended proofs before signing off on it.
It's a big chunk of book, though the publishers have pared it down from the submitted 1,000 pages to 700+ with a format change.
I have revised and updated it from the ground up, with the assistance of 250 other professional engineers. Though I had the early drafts reviewed many times by these collaborators, I'm looking forward to seeing the first reviews from readers.
It will be out on 1st December in the UK, and two weeks later in the US, and it's available to pre-order now here: http://store.elsevier.com/Process-Pla...
It's a big chunk of book, though the publishers have pared it down from the submitted 1,000 pages to 700+ with a format change.
I have revised and updated it from the ground up, with the assistance of 250 other professional engineers. Though I had the early drafts reviewed many times by these collaborators, I'm looking forward to seeing the first reviews from readers.
It will be out on 1st December in the UK, and two weeks later in the US, and it's available to pre-order now here: http://store.elsevier.com/Process-Pla...
July 4, 2016
The Making of an Expert Engineer
The Making of an Expert Engineer by James TrevelyanMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
An excellent book. Thoughtful and well supported by what scientific research there is in an ill-researched area, but based ultimately in the experience of engineers. His 85 practice concepts and 17 misconceptions are almost all right on the money.
If my first book goes to a second edition in 2018, I'll be including this in further reading.
View all my reviews
June 24, 2016
Chemical Engineering Writing
I love to write. As well as the technical and expert witness reports which are so much of my professional practice at this stage of my career, my second textbook is about to be submitted to the publishers, and I do a lot of blogging to keep the writing muscles limber. For anyone who has never read my "Voice of Chemical Engineering" blogs for Elsevier, you can see them here. There are also my posts on LinkedIn, as well of those on "Expertise Unlimited". I am also currently writing articles for "Chemical Engineering", "Chemical Engineering Practice", and "Engineering and Technology Reference" magazines, and a piece on Reactor Selection and Design for Ullmanns Encyclopaedia of Chemical Technology. I also have a research paper on my teaching practice at Nottingham to write up. Oh, and a PhD. Luckily I write quickly...
May 30, 2016
The Lost Art of Process Plant Layout
I have just finished updating the IChemE’s book on Process Plant Layout, which will be one of a very small number of publications on the subject when it comes out in December.
I have had to be strict with myself with respect to my inclination to leave in original text and offer comment on it in those few areas where there has been extensive change over the last thirty years, and many others where there has been none. People will however not be buying the book for a history lesson, they just want to know how to lay a plant out, so I will do my editorializing here.
Dr. Mecklenburgh (the author of the original book) was a bit of a futurist, and I have had to cut almost all of his speculation about how things were going to change in process plant layout out of my updated version of his book, because these changes did not happen. I still however commonly have academics telling me that these very same changes are just on the horizon, just as they were in 1985.
Mecklenburgh’s focus on plant layout seems to have been instrumental in him not imagining the largest change which has happened, which might be thought catastrophic from his point of view. Research into and teaching of Plant Layout has more or less entirely disappeared from academia, even though it is just as essential to engineering practice as ever. Much of the real know-how about plant layout is consequently now in the heads of people approaching retirement, though I have gathered as much of this as I can, and put it into my book.
We still have the same design and layout tasks as we did in 1985 and new Health, Safety, and Environmental legislation has been a much more significant driver of change in professional design practice than the direct effect of technological advances. Technology other that microelectronics has changed relatively little since 1985.
None of the new things which Mecklenburgh forecast computers would be able to do in future in the field of layout have happened, and those things which they can do are as constrained by data entry requirements as ever.
Mecklenburgh was claiming exactly the same functionality as offered by the latest modelling programmes back in 1985. (It just took a week to run the programme back then). It is amazing that the desktop computers of Mecklenburgh’s time (which must have had at best 6 Bit Intel 80286 processors) could do all of the things which the latest 64 Bit 80663 processor can. The modern chip is just faster and has a larger memory – it’s no smarter.
Mecklenburgh was however right when he forecast that 3D CAD models of plants might replace the physical models of his day. The use of 3D models has in some sectors made those who produce them, (often piping engineers or technical architects with a process specialization) very important in plant layout.
Microelectronics have more significantly led to two things which Mecklenburgh did not forsee: computer control and networking.
There is no mention in the original book of a software engineering discipline. Control panels were dumb monitoring stations and starters and controllers were field mounted. The instrumentation and electrical “departments” were responsible for designing and programming control loops.
Motor control centres now contain smart starters and instruments, each having far more computing power than Mecklenburgh’s desktop 286 PC, or even his room-filling “mainframe”. These smart starters are controlled by even smarter industrial computers such as PLCs in ways which alter all aspects of plant design, including layout.
More profound still has been the broader impact of networking bringing about a reduction of the cost of entering markets which has meant that the only monolithic vertically and horizontally integrated companies nowadays are those trading in network goods. Engineering companies specialize in their core business nowadays. There are very few design offices in most operating companies any more, let alone sub-departments with process, electrical and instrument design capability.
Networked computers mean that we can have a design office in India, which we can contact as readily as one on the other side of the site, and pay design staff at Indian rates. Drawings can be sent back and forth, shared in multiple copies, edited and marked up in electronic format.
Structural changes in where engineering happens which originated in technology away from the discipline itself have been far more significant to professional design practice than any new technology within the discipline.
The changes which have happened were driven by wider social forces, and this is how it should be. Engineers serve society – we don’t tell society what to want as much as we make its dreams come true.
I have had to be strict with myself with respect to my inclination to leave in original text and offer comment on it in those few areas where there has been extensive change over the last thirty years, and many others where there has been none. People will however not be buying the book for a history lesson, they just want to know how to lay a plant out, so I will do my editorializing here.
Dr. Mecklenburgh (the author of the original book) was a bit of a futurist, and I have had to cut almost all of his speculation about how things were going to change in process plant layout out of my updated version of his book, because these changes did not happen. I still however commonly have academics telling me that these very same changes are just on the horizon, just as they were in 1985.
Mecklenburgh’s focus on plant layout seems to have been instrumental in him not imagining the largest change which has happened, which might be thought catastrophic from his point of view. Research into and teaching of Plant Layout has more or less entirely disappeared from academia, even though it is just as essential to engineering practice as ever. Much of the real know-how about plant layout is consequently now in the heads of people approaching retirement, though I have gathered as much of this as I can, and put it into my book.
We still have the same design and layout tasks as we did in 1985 and new Health, Safety, and Environmental legislation has been a much more significant driver of change in professional design practice than the direct effect of technological advances. Technology other that microelectronics has changed relatively little since 1985.
None of the new things which Mecklenburgh forecast computers would be able to do in future in the field of layout have happened, and those things which they can do are as constrained by data entry requirements as ever.
Mecklenburgh was claiming exactly the same functionality as offered by the latest modelling programmes back in 1985. (It just took a week to run the programme back then). It is amazing that the desktop computers of Mecklenburgh’s time (which must have had at best 6 Bit Intel 80286 processors) could do all of the things which the latest 64 Bit 80663 processor can. The modern chip is just faster and has a larger memory – it’s no smarter.
Mecklenburgh was however right when he forecast that 3D CAD models of plants might replace the physical models of his day. The use of 3D models has in some sectors made those who produce them, (often piping engineers or technical architects with a process specialization) very important in plant layout.
Microelectronics have more significantly led to two things which Mecklenburgh did not forsee: computer control and networking.
There is no mention in the original book of a software engineering discipline. Control panels were dumb monitoring stations and starters and controllers were field mounted. The instrumentation and electrical “departments” were responsible for designing and programming control loops.
Motor control centres now contain smart starters and instruments, each having far more computing power than Mecklenburgh’s desktop 286 PC, or even his room-filling “mainframe”. These smart starters are controlled by even smarter industrial computers such as PLCs in ways which alter all aspects of plant design, including layout.
More profound still has been the broader impact of networking bringing about a reduction of the cost of entering markets which has meant that the only monolithic vertically and horizontally integrated companies nowadays are those trading in network goods. Engineering companies specialize in their core business nowadays. There are very few design offices in most operating companies any more, let alone sub-departments with process, electrical and instrument design capability.
Networked computers mean that we can have a design office in India, which we can contact as readily as one on the other side of the site, and pay design staff at Indian rates. Drawings can be sent back and forth, shared in multiple copies, edited and marked up in electronic format.
Structural changes in where engineering happens which originated in technology away from the discipline itself have been far more significant to professional design practice than any new technology within the discipline.
The changes which have happened were driven by wider social forces, and this is how it should be. Engineers serve society – we don’t tell society what to want as much as we make its dreams come true.
May 21, 2016
Chemical Engineering Graduates are Not Chemical Engineers!
I wrote a post on LinkedIn a few weeks back (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/chemic...) about how chemical engineering graduates wanted to be chemical engineers, but half of them never would be, because we are producing far more grads than there are jobs for.
This year's batch of grads are coming on to a market where they are not just competing with each other (and those of last year's grads who haven't yet given up hope of a career in engineering). They are also competing with a glut of experienced engineers from the Oil and Gas industry who have lost their jobs as a result of the oil price crash.
Few people accuse chem eng grads of a lack of confidence (many may as well be wearing the tee-shirt above) but they have been misled into thinking that they are already professional chemical engineers. Many of them seemingly cannot understand why they have not been given the well-paid job they thought they had been promised, earned as a right by completing a very hard degree course. Many others play employers off against each other, (or try to), as if they were a commodity in short supply.
Many of the misconceptions underlying these mistakes come from bad advice from academics with no idea of what is happening in industry and/or university careers services stuck in the 1970s. So for all of you looking to get a job as an engineer with no previous experience of working as one, let me help you out with a few facts to aid a useful attitude adjustment:
1. You are not an engineer yet. People like you are not in short supply, there are twice as many grads as there are jobs.
2. Neither are people like you with high marks in a degree programme in short supply. 75% of grads have "good degrees" nowadays. Universities graduate far more students with a upper second or first class degree than they did in the past. In any case, some employers discriminate against those with first class degrees, which can make candidates look more suited to academia than engineering.You are not an engineer yet. Maybe you'll never be one-there's a lot more to it than there was in those exams you took.
3. That stuff you learned in university was not engineering, and the people who taught you it were not engineers. Giving you a job means that real engineers are going to have to take time out from their engineering work to teach you engineering. You are a liability for a year or two, and some of you will prove to not have what it takes. You are not an engineer yet, you need to know how, not just know about.
4. Employers are not going to give you a break so that you can show them that you can solve real world problems, because you can't. That's what engineers do, and you aren't an engineer yet. Would someone allow a green med school grad to carry out open heart surgery? Get over yourself. My expert witness experience covers a few cases where green engineering grads were given a chance to solve real world problems. It didn't go well.
5. You don't even know what an engineer is yet, so don't be picky. If anyone offers you a job with a title ending in the word engineer, be grateful. Take it. Work hard. Learn what engineering is about. Then you perhaps get to wear the tee-shirt. Until then remember that you are not an engineer yet, and you are not automatically entitled to become one.
6. Some chemical engineers may earn a lot of money, but you aren't a chemical engineer yet. The market value of your skillset is less than zero, as explained in the last section. The high wages paid to a small subset of grads in the past (mainly by big oil and gas operating companies) were golden handcuffs, intended to keep those grads there until they were useful. Try to remember this when you are considering whether employers are offering you a good enough benefits package.
7. Employers are not refusing to take you on to be awkward, as it seems some academics (and others who are not yet engineers) think. Academia may be able to create more or less as many new degree places as they like, but engineering firms can only fund new jobs by getting new work. Taking on a graduate is an expensive speculative investment in an uncertain future, and times are tough. Some graduate hires will become engineers, but some will not. Of those that become engineers, many will leave the company which invested in them for better pay elsewhere.
Whilst there are those who think that arrogance in process design is best measured in nanomorans, I have earned the right to confidence in my judgement. Until you have, I'd recommend a bit of humility and gratitude. Or there's always a job going at the checkout in Aldi.
This year's batch of grads are coming on to a market where they are not just competing with each other (and those of last year's grads who haven't yet given up hope of a career in engineering). They are also competing with a glut of experienced engineers from the Oil and Gas industry who have lost their jobs as a result of the oil price crash.
Few people accuse chem eng grads of a lack of confidence (many may as well be wearing the tee-shirt above) but they have been misled into thinking that they are already professional chemical engineers. Many of them seemingly cannot understand why they have not been given the well-paid job they thought they had been promised, earned as a right by completing a very hard degree course. Many others play employers off against each other, (or try to), as if they were a commodity in short supply.
Many of the misconceptions underlying these mistakes come from bad advice from academics with no idea of what is happening in industry and/or university careers services stuck in the 1970s. So for all of you looking to get a job as an engineer with no previous experience of working as one, let me help you out with a few facts to aid a useful attitude adjustment:
1. You are not an engineer yet. People like you are not in short supply, there are twice as many grads as there are jobs.
2. Neither are people like you with high marks in a degree programme in short supply. 75% of grads have "good degrees" nowadays. Universities graduate far more students with a upper second or first class degree than they did in the past. In any case, some employers discriminate against those with first class degrees, which can make candidates look more suited to academia than engineering.You are not an engineer yet. Maybe you'll never be one-there's a lot more to it than there was in those exams you took.
3. That stuff you learned in university was not engineering, and the people who taught you it were not engineers. Giving you a job means that real engineers are going to have to take time out from their engineering work to teach you engineering. You are a liability for a year or two, and some of you will prove to not have what it takes. You are not an engineer yet, you need to know how, not just know about.
4. Employers are not going to give you a break so that you can show them that you can solve real world problems, because you can't. That's what engineers do, and you aren't an engineer yet. Would someone allow a green med school grad to carry out open heart surgery? Get over yourself. My expert witness experience covers a few cases where green engineering grads were given a chance to solve real world problems. It didn't go well.
5. You don't even know what an engineer is yet, so don't be picky. If anyone offers you a job with a title ending in the word engineer, be grateful. Take it. Work hard. Learn what engineering is about. Then you perhaps get to wear the tee-shirt. Until then remember that you are not an engineer yet, and you are not automatically entitled to become one.
6. Some chemical engineers may earn a lot of money, but you aren't a chemical engineer yet. The market value of your skillset is less than zero, as explained in the last section. The high wages paid to a small subset of grads in the past (mainly by big oil and gas operating companies) were golden handcuffs, intended to keep those grads there until they were useful. Try to remember this when you are considering whether employers are offering you a good enough benefits package.
7. Employers are not refusing to take you on to be awkward, as it seems some academics (and others who are not yet engineers) think. Academia may be able to create more or less as many new degree places as they like, but engineering firms can only fund new jobs by getting new work. Taking on a graduate is an expensive speculative investment in an uncertain future, and times are tough. Some graduate hires will become engineers, but some will not. Of those that become engineers, many will leave the company which invested in them for better pay elsewhere.
Whilst there are those who think that arrogance in process design is best measured in nanomorans, I have earned the right to confidence in my judgement. Until you have, I'd recommend a bit of humility and gratitude. Or there's always a job going at the checkout in Aldi.
November 1, 2015
Back to the Grind
I'm back to writing my Plant Layout book this week. Hoping to get a draft complete by year end.
More or less all of the content is there, I have restructured and restyled it, and incorporated comments from other experienced plant designers.
Experience from my last book however tells me that getting illustrations and permissions, and making it all work together as a unified, coherent whole takes an astonishing amount of time.
As this book is three or four times as long as the last one, I have allowed as long for these issues as I did for writing the content.
More or less all of the content is there, I have restructured and restyled it, and incorporated comments from other experienced plant designers.
Experience from my last book however tells me that getting illustrations and permissions, and making it all work together as a unified, coherent whole takes an astonishing amount of time.
As this book is three or four times as long as the last one, I have allowed as long for these issues as I did for writing the content.
October 22, 2015
Total Process Plant Design
I was reading a PhD thesis by one of Mecklenburgh's students (on a computer program to lay out plant) as part of my research for updating Mecklenburgh's Process Plant Layout earlier in the week.
The student starts his explanation by splitting process plant design into process design and plant design, and I was reminded again of Pugh's Total Design.
It is hard to use the word "holistic" without feeling a little bit like an alternative medicine salesman, who also tend to describe science as "reductionist". Unfortunately, the primary criticisms I would make of how process plant design is taught require the use of these concepts, but we should bear in mind that there is no alternative engineering.
So we might split process plant design into process design and plant design. We might split these further and further until we have produced versions of process and plant design which are mathematical problems. Even when we do this, the final problems are very complex indeed, even as straight maths problems.
To take the example of getting computers to lay out process equipment in space, these has essentially been no progress since the 1980s. That PhD thesis claimed to describe a fully functional computer programme for plant layout in the 1990s, but the most recent reviews of the literature make clear that no-one has come up with an algorithm as good as a professional engineer even to the simplified problem they are trying to solve.
This intractable problem is not how to best lay out plant at all. It is how to allocate the arrangement in planar space of objects with simplified characteristics in order to minimize the cost of materials transport between them.
Safety, operability, process robustness, and most cost considerations are removed in order to simplify to the point where engineering has become maths. The space in which this exercise happens is perfectly flat, and adding a second floor seems to make the intractable impossible.
Whilst this has kept academics who think they are working on layout issues busy for thirty years or so, it has not been of the slightest use to professional engineers as far as I know. There were few takers for that PhD students program, despite his claims of utility.
Alternatively we might consider what has happened to process design over the same period. Academics now think that process design is done in simulation programs and optimised with pinch analysis for maximum energy recovery, ignoring cost, safety and robustness entirely.
So the stage that we are at now is that academics think that they have solved "process plant design" by splitting it in two, and then removing all of the uncertainties, ambiguities, and complexities from these two aspects.
Unfortunately the bits they removed were the important ones, and the problems they have solved were not problems at all. Optimising for any single variable whether that be approximated materials transport cost or maximum energy recovery is not smart, it is stupid. It wasn't even smart to try this, computers can only solve stupid problems.
We may nominally split the intrinsically holistic process plant design into parts, either for convenience when teaching, or for the practicalities of task allocation in professional life.
There is nothing wrong with this, but if we mistake these artificial divisions for real ones, we will be terrible process plant designers. If we do not teach students that these are artificial boundaries, they will not understand that process engineering always crosses them at every scale of consideration.
Process and hydraulic design, unit operation design and selection, plant layout, process control, instrumentation, costing, hazard analysis are all considered together and balanced against each other by professional process plant designers. They never optimize for less than three variable simultaneously. Those variables are broadly cost, safety and robustness, but these are themselves complex.
Humans however evolved to see and manage patterns in complexity. We don't need to dumb design down to the point where a computer can grind out an answer. We can intuit an answer and then apply maths and science to testing its plausibility.
Engineering is a creative, intuitive, imaginative activity. Maths and science are just two of its many tools. Computer programs are at best not quite as smart as the people who wrote them, and long before the point where they are smart as people, become too complex for people to really understand.
The oversimplifed modelling based approach to chemical engineering espoused by many academics is a dead end, missing the point of the exercise entirely.
The student starts his explanation by splitting process plant design into process design and plant design, and I was reminded again of Pugh's Total Design.
It is hard to use the word "holistic" without feeling a little bit like an alternative medicine salesman, who also tend to describe science as "reductionist". Unfortunately, the primary criticisms I would make of how process plant design is taught require the use of these concepts, but we should bear in mind that there is no alternative engineering.
So we might split process plant design into process design and plant design. We might split these further and further until we have produced versions of process and plant design which are mathematical problems. Even when we do this, the final problems are very complex indeed, even as straight maths problems.
To take the example of getting computers to lay out process equipment in space, these has essentially been no progress since the 1980s. That PhD thesis claimed to describe a fully functional computer programme for plant layout in the 1990s, but the most recent reviews of the literature make clear that no-one has come up with an algorithm as good as a professional engineer even to the simplified problem they are trying to solve.
This intractable problem is not how to best lay out plant at all. It is how to allocate the arrangement in planar space of objects with simplified characteristics in order to minimize the cost of materials transport between them.
Safety, operability, process robustness, and most cost considerations are removed in order to simplify to the point where engineering has become maths. The space in which this exercise happens is perfectly flat, and adding a second floor seems to make the intractable impossible.
Whilst this has kept academics who think they are working on layout issues busy for thirty years or so, it has not been of the slightest use to professional engineers as far as I know. There were few takers for that PhD students program, despite his claims of utility.
Alternatively we might consider what has happened to process design over the same period. Academics now think that process design is done in simulation programs and optimised with pinch analysis for maximum energy recovery, ignoring cost, safety and robustness entirely.
So the stage that we are at now is that academics think that they have solved "process plant design" by splitting it in two, and then removing all of the uncertainties, ambiguities, and complexities from these two aspects.
Unfortunately the bits they removed were the important ones, and the problems they have solved were not problems at all. Optimising for any single variable whether that be approximated materials transport cost or maximum energy recovery is not smart, it is stupid. It wasn't even smart to try this, computers can only solve stupid problems.
We may nominally split the intrinsically holistic process plant design into parts, either for convenience when teaching, or for the practicalities of task allocation in professional life.
There is nothing wrong with this, but if we mistake these artificial divisions for real ones, we will be terrible process plant designers. If we do not teach students that these are artificial boundaries, they will not understand that process engineering always crosses them at every scale of consideration.
Process and hydraulic design, unit operation design and selection, plant layout, process control, instrumentation, costing, hazard analysis are all considered together and balanced against each other by professional process plant designers. They never optimize for less than three variable simultaneously. Those variables are broadly cost, safety and robustness, but these are themselves complex.
Humans however evolved to see and manage patterns in complexity. We don't need to dumb design down to the point where a computer can grind out an answer. We can intuit an answer and then apply maths and science to testing its plausibility.
Engineering is a creative, intuitive, imaginative activity. Maths and science are just two of its many tools. Computer programs are at best not quite as smart as the people who wrote them, and long before the point where they are smart as people, become too complex for people to really understand.
The oversimplifed modelling based approach to chemical engineering espoused by many academics is a dead end, missing the point of the exercise entirely.
