Barbeque Lunch/Quick Update

8 août 2016 16:01 Published by Tony Wu Laisser vos pensées

Wow I can’t believe that it is August already. Summer is upon us and the weather has been hitting close to 30°C in Metro Vancouver these past two weeks. Personally, I am not a huge fan of the heat but it makes for perfect barbeque weather. This past Thursday, everyone chipped in for a small feast, which consisted of barbequed chicken tandoori, salad, and some ice cream.

Words could not describe how hungry I was all day. I was busy working in the lab just waiting until it was time to eat.

The chicken was perfectly grilled and very tasty. I was a little disappointed in the ‘spicy’ chicken as it lacked the heat that I was hoping for, but the regular chicken tandoori was very tasty. After the delicious lunch that was prepared by my supervisor Ranbir, I headed back into the chemistry lab where I continued working my material balance project.

Over the past month and a half, I have been working hard on obtaining data on a material balance project from the Intercon and Prince George mills. Various effluent and chemical samples were collected from every step of the Kraft process from the digestion stage to the re-causting stage and the water treatment stage. In total, around 400 samples were collected from 4 days in June (although CPI only has to test half of them). The engineers at the mill want the concentrations of sodium, potassium, sulfur, and chloride measured in each of the samples. A lot of dilutions were made and they were analyzed using the ICP-OES and the HPLC (see my previous blogs for a detailed description of these methods).

At the time of writing this blog, I am about a week away from completing all the testing. Although the testing has been quite repetitive, I have learned a lot from the process of working through it. Time management was a crucial skill that I needed to apply during that time. In addition, I was put in a position where I had to be decisive and take decisive action when my supervisor was away. Whether it was troubleshooting an instrument or running out of supplies in the middle of testing, the challenges that I faced throughout the course of this project have made me more independent in trying to come up with my own solutions to problems instead of always relying on a supervisor.

-TW