I collected some pics off the net showing various aspects of Zeolites. (Link to earlier post that tells how I got started wandering down this path.)
Here's some drawings of the molecular structure, and one micrograph of a seed used for growing zeolite crystals.
Here are some pictures of natural zeolite. Some look like plain rocks, others are elaborate crystal structures.
Lastly we have pics of what the stuff looks like on the commercial end of things.
Tuesday, July 6, 2010
Quote of the Day
While young men are more affected emotionally by the quality of their current relationships, young women are more emotionally affected by whether they are in a relationship or not. - Wake Forest Professor of Sociology Robin Simonfrom Science News. Curious. This might explain why a woman will stay in a bad, even abusive, relationship. Doesn't explain why a man would stay in a bad relationship though.
I originally read this story a couple of weeks ago, and didn't think much about it, but this one line stuck with me and so I finally went back and tracked it down.
Monday, July 5, 2010
We Dive At Dawn
We Dive At Dawn is a British submarine war movie made during WWII. It's really pretty good. The British accents are a bit thick, and being as this is an old movie, there are no subtitles (AKA closed captioning) available. There are a number of reviews out there on the net that can tell you all about it.
I watched it this weekend and there are a few points that struck me. The submarine is dispatched to attempt to intercept a German battleship on it's way to the Kiel Canal, which cuts across the Denmark peninsula. On the way the submarine encounters a life saving station out in the middle of the North Sea. There are three stranded German aviators on it, and as soon as they see the British sub they attempt to send a radio message. The Brits shoot down the aerial, and the Germans jump into water and swim as quick as they can to the submarine. This whole scene was kind of weird. Life saving station in the middle of the North Sea? They have a radio, but haven't been rescued? They report the subs position (so it can be sunk), and now they desperately want to get on board that same submarine? Something just doesn't compute here.
To get to the battleship they have to negotiate a mine field and a submarine net. The underwater shots were utterly convincing. I imagine they were probably done with models. With the grainy images, the water being not totally transparent, and the lack of background probably made it easier to fake, but well faked it was.
They got through the submarine net by repeatedly ramming it. The net appeared to be made of 1" or 2" steel cables tied into squares between four and eight feet on a side. The submarine was about six squares high. They had to ram the net five or six times, and each time the cables on the net gave way a little more. I was talking to Jack about this at lunch today and he thought it was totally bogus. I am willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. Someday maybe I'll stumble over some stories about submarines versus nets and I'll find out.
When they catch up with the German battleship there is a lot of fussing with getting the sub in position to fire. When they do finally get in position, they let go with all six torpedoes, in sequence, one after another, spaced a few seconds apart. I seem to recall reading about submarines having that many torpedo tubes, but I don't recall ever seeing a submarine movie where they launched six torpedoes all at once. Four maybe, but never six. That was a surprise.
There are German destroyers in the area and they are soon dropping depth charges on our heroes. Due to the incessant pounding the submariners don't know whether they have hit their target or not. Eventually their fuel tank is damaged and they lose most of the oil for their diesel engines. They have a dead German prisoner on board, so they decide to pull the old blow-a-bunch-of-junk-out-the-torpedo-tube ploy to convince the Germans that they have successfully sunk the British sub. In addition, they surface the submarine aft end first briefly, just enough to stick the tail in the air, before it slips back below the surface. Evidently the combination of: 1) a large amount of oil on the surface, 2) a dead body dressed in a British officer's uniform, 3) a bunch of flotsam, and 4) the apparent last gasp of the submarine itself was enough to convince the Germans that they had killed the interloper. I have seen the old blow-a-bunch-of-junk-out-the-torpedo-tube ploy many times before. This may have been the first.
They have escaped destruction, but they are in enemy waters, far from home, and nearly out of fuel. The captain decides to head for a nearby island, let the crew go ashore and then scuttle the submarine. The crew will be interred, or more likely sent to a prison camp, for the duration of the war. And then some wiseguy pops up and tells the captain about a nearby harbor where they might be able to steal enough oil to get home. Well, getting home would be a heck of a lot better than what they were facing, so they go for it. As luck would have it there is a Danish tanker in the harbor, and the captain is more than happy to help the British steal some of his oil. Denmark is occupied, so there are German soldiers about, so we get a firefight where the valiant British soldiers mow down a bunch of the evil Nazis. The whole point of this paragraph was to talk about the Danish Captain. It was really nice to run into someone so agreeable.
I watched it this weekend and there are a few points that struck me. The submarine is dispatched to attempt to intercept a German battleship on it's way to the Kiel Canal, which cuts across the Denmark peninsula. On the way the submarine encounters a life saving station out in the middle of the North Sea. There are three stranded German aviators on it, and as soon as they see the British sub they attempt to send a radio message. The Brits shoot down the aerial, and the Germans jump into water and swim as quick as they can to the submarine. This whole scene was kind of weird. Life saving station in the middle of the North Sea? They have a radio, but haven't been rescued? They report the subs position (so it can be sunk), and now they desperately want to get on board that same submarine? Something just doesn't compute here.
To get to the battleship they have to negotiate a mine field and a submarine net. The underwater shots were utterly convincing. I imagine they were probably done with models. With the grainy images, the water being not totally transparent, and the lack of background probably made it easier to fake, but well faked it was.
They got through the submarine net by repeatedly ramming it. The net appeared to be made of 1" or 2" steel cables tied into squares between four and eight feet on a side. The submarine was about six squares high. They had to ram the net five or six times, and each time the cables on the net gave way a little more. I was talking to Jack about this at lunch today and he thought it was totally bogus. I am willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. Someday maybe I'll stumble over some stories about submarines versus nets and I'll find out.
When they catch up with the German battleship there is a lot of fussing with getting the sub in position to fire. When they do finally get in position, they let go with all six torpedoes, in sequence, one after another, spaced a few seconds apart. I seem to recall reading about submarines having that many torpedo tubes, but I don't recall ever seeing a submarine movie where they launched six torpedoes all at once. Four maybe, but never six. That was a surprise.
There are German destroyers in the area and they are soon dropping depth charges on our heroes. Due to the incessant pounding the submariners don't know whether they have hit their target or not. Eventually their fuel tank is damaged and they lose most of the oil for their diesel engines. They have a dead German prisoner on board, so they decide to pull the old blow-a-bunch-of-junk-out-the-torpedo-tube ploy to convince the Germans that they have successfully sunk the British sub. In addition, they surface the submarine aft end first briefly, just enough to stick the tail in the air, before it slips back below the surface. Evidently the combination of: 1) a large amount of oil on the surface, 2) a dead body dressed in a British officer's uniform, 3) a bunch of flotsam, and 4) the apparent last gasp of the submarine itself was enough to convince the Germans that they had killed the interloper. I have seen the old blow-a-bunch-of-junk-out-the-torpedo-tube ploy many times before. This may have been the first.
They have escaped destruction, but they are in enemy waters, far from home, and nearly out of fuel. The captain decides to head for a nearby island, let the crew go ashore and then scuttle the submarine. The crew will be interred, or more likely sent to a prison camp, for the duration of the war. And then some wiseguy pops up and tells the captain about a nearby harbor where they might be able to steal enough oil to get home. Well, getting home would be a heck of a lot better than what they were facing, so they go for it. As luck would have it there is a Danish tanker in the harbor, and the captain is more than happy to help the British steal some of his oil. Denmark is occupied, so there are German soldiers about, so we get a firefight where the valiant British soldiers mow down a bunch of the evil Nazis. The whole point of this paragraph was to talk about the Danish Captain. It was really nice to run into someone so agreeable.
Oxygen
I saw another episode of Top Gear the other day. This time the challenge was to buy a used car sight unseen over the internet in Bolivia and drive it over the Andes to the Pacific Ocean. Each of the three guys picked a different 4x4 vehicle. The show's producers arranged to have them delivered via barge to a river bank on the Amazon River. When they had successfully gotten their cars off the barge and onto dry land, the producers rewarded them with a care package, which included a winch, a chain saw, and a package each of condoms, Tampax and Viagra.
After many trials and tribulations, they successfully escaped the rain forest, negotiated the Road Of Death, and reached the Andes mountains. Here they began making use of cocaine in the form of leaves and tea. This sufficed until they got up to about 15,000 feet (of elevation). That's when the Viagra got put to use.
Now they have a choice: take the short way over the volcano or the long way around. They have been slogging along for days now and are ready to be done with this, so they opt for the short route. The show makes a big deal about it being an active volcano, but they don't even consider that it might cause a problem, and in fact it doesn't. However, the part about going OVER the volcano does. They get up to 17,000 feet and call it quits. There just isn't enough air. I am surprised they made it that far. I've hiked up to 10,000 feet a couple of times and there isn't any air at that elevation. I found it interesting that there is a road there. Who the devil built the road? And who drives on it? Anyway, the cars are still running, but there isn't enough air for the drivers. They turn back and end up taking the long way around.
I was talking to my friends about this and we got to thinking about how you could get oxygen and somebody mentioned the little machines used by people who need oxygen for medical reasons. It used to be that people would carry a small bottle of oxygen around with them (on a little cart, even the little ones are heavy), but now we have these little machines that make oxygen out of thin air. So naturally we want to know how they do it. No one knows, so I volunteer to look it up, and here's what I found:
After many trials and tribulations, they successfully escaped the rain forest, negotiated the Road Of Death, and reached the Andes mountains. Here they began making use of cocaine in the form of leaves and tea. This sufficed until they got up to about 15,000 feet (of elevation). That's when the Viagra got put to use.
Now they have a choice: take the short way over the volcano or the long way around. They have been slogging along for days now and are ready to be done with this, so they opt for the short route. The show makes a big deal about it being an active volcano, but they don't even consider that it might cause a problem, and in fact it doesn't. However, the part about going OVER the volcano does. They get up to 17,000 feet and call it quits. There just isn't enough air. I am surprised they made it that far. I've hiked up to 10,000 feet a couple of times and there isn't any air at that elevation. I found it interesting that there is a road there. Who the devil built the road? And who drives on it? Anyway, the cars are still running, but there isn't enough air for the drivers. They turn back and end up taking the long way around.
I was talking to my friends about this and we got to thinking about how you could get oxygen and somebody mentioned the little machines used by people who need oxygen for medical reasons. It used to be that people would carry a small bottle of oxygen around with them (on a little cart, even the little ones are heavy), but now we have these little machines that make oxygen out of thin air. So naturally we want to know how they do it. No one knows, so I volunteer to look it up, and here's what I found:
From Wikipedia:
The simplest oxygen concentrator is capable of continuous delivery of oxygen and has internal functions based around two cylinders, filled with a zeolite material, which selectively adsorbs the nitrogen in the air. In each cycle, air flows through one cylinder at a pressure of around 20 lbf/in² (138 kPa, or 1.36 atmospheres) where the nitrogen molecules are captured by the zeolite, while the other cylinder is vented off to ambient atmospheric pressure allowing the captured nitrogen to dissipate.
Typical units have cycles of around 20 seconds, and allow for a continuous supply of oxygen at a flow rate of up to approximately five liters per minute (LPM) at concentrations anywhere from 50 to 95 %. This process is called pressure swing adsorption (PSA).[1] Since 1999, concentrators providing up to 10 LPM have been available for high flow patients, in sizes not much larger or heavier than 5 LPM concentrators.
and Zeolite:
Zeolites are microporous, aluminosilicate minerals commonly used as commercial adsorbents.[1] The term zeolite was originally coined in 1756 by Swedish mineralogist Axel Fredrik Cronstedt, who observed that upon rapidly heating the material stilbite, it produced large amounts of steam from water that had been adsorbed by the material. Based on this, he called the material zeolite, from the Greek ζέω (zeō), meaning "boil" and λίθος (lithos), meaning "stone".[2]
As of January 2008, 175 unique zeolite frameworks have been identified, and over 40 naturally occurring zeolite frameworks are known
So we pump air into a container filled with this funny, probably custom made, rock. The Nitrogen creeps into the rock, which means the remaining air has a higher concentration of oxygen. It does this for 20 seconds and then it switches to the other cylinder, and the first cylinder is vented to the air. The pressure is now lower, so the nitrogen flows back out of the rock.
Zeolites are used for all kinds of things, from kitty litter to gasoline refineries to oxygen supplies for aircraft (here's what they used to use). It is basically a porous rock, but it is not like pumice or other lightweight volcanic rock. I suspect it is more like your run of the mill granite. I mean the pores are sub-microscopic. I don't know what these tiny pores do to the density.
You wouldn't be able to tell it was porous by looking at it, unless you maybe had a scanning electron microscope, and even them I'm not sure you could tell. Only by observing the disappearance of a liquid of gas and then it's reappearance under heat could you be sure of what you had.
I am disappointed. I was really hoping for a micro-cryogenic-fractional-
P.S. The Tampax and condoms were used to waterproof some critical parts of the cars when they had to ford a river.
Saturday, July 3, 2010
Dodge Power Wagon
Just when you think you've seen it all, and then somebody does this:
Via StreetFire.net
Bonus: My 1952 Chevrolet Pickup makes a brief appearance just after the 40 second mark.
Via StreetFire.net
Bonus: My 1952 Chevrolet Pickup makes a brief appearance just after the 40 second mark.
Thursday, July 1, 2010
Marc's Broken Leg
Marc told us this story at lunch today. A few years ago he broke his leg skiing, just above his ski boot. It was just a simple fracture of the smaller of the two bones. It hurt, but it didn't stop. Three weeks later it was still hurting so he went to the doctor. Doctor X-rayed it and saw the break. The bones were aligned and it was knitting, so there was nothing to be done, just take it easy and it will be fine.
Not too much later he gets tackled by the neighbors dog. Same routine, waits a couple of weeks before going to the doctor. Doctor X-rays it. This time the ends of the bone are not aligned, they are slightly offset, but as before, it is starting to knit, so just take it easy and it will be fine. No more accidents befall him and eventually the bone heals and his leg is fine, except he can feel a lump in the bone where the misaligned break was.
Now here's the weird part. You might think that the bone would just stay that way forever, but no. After a couple of years the lump had disappeared. The bone had straightened itself out. I guess that makes sense. Bones are alive and are constantly replacing their structure, so it could do that, but how would it know? Pretty stinking amazing what the body is capable of.
Not too much later he gets tackled by the neighbors dog. Same routine, waits a couple of weeks before going to the doctor. Doctor X-rays it. This time the ends of the bone are not aligned, they are slightly offset, but as before, it is starting to knit, so just take it easy and it will be fine. No more accidents befall him and eventually the bone heals and his leg is fine, except he can feel a lump in the bone where the misaligned break was.
Now here's the weird part. You might think that the bone would just stay that way forever, but no. After a couple of years the lump had disappeared. The bone had straightened itself out. I guess that makes sense. Bones are alive and are constantly replacing their structure, so it could do that, but how would it know? Pretty stinking amazing what the body is capable of.
Books & Movies
Ross is reading Tree of Smoke by Dennis Johnson and he really likes it.
I saw previews for these movies the other day and they looked pretty intriguing:
I saw previews for these movies the other day and they looked pretty intriguing:
- Farewell
- MicMacs
- Winter's Bone
- Coco & Igor
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