Back at it again
June 7, 2016 4:34 pm Leave your thoughts
I would like to start off by thanking Canfor Pulp Innovations (CPI) and The Greenest Workforce for giving me the opportunity to blog about my experience working in the Canadian forest products industry. For my fellow readers who do not know who I am, allow me to re-introduce myself (Jay Z voice). I am a third-year co-op chemical engineering student at the University of British Columbia. I am currently on my second co-op term as a research assistant at Canfor Pulp Innovations located in Burnaby, British Columbia. Growing up in Victoria, I had a passion for playing basketball and cooking. I started to get into photography about a year ago, so you can expect plenty of photos in my blog posts.
During my work term, I was mainly responsible for making and testing hand sheets. Hand sheets are small circular paper disks of a standardized weight and thickness that are used to test the physical properties of pulp. I also got a chance to work in the pilot plant with the disk refiner. The data collected from the refiner and hand sheet testing is used to generate refining curves, which relates the refining energy to the tensile strength and other physical properties of the pulp. This information is useful for customers who want to know how much refining is needed to achieve a certain tensile strength in the paper.
[Hand sheet making]
Now I am back working at CPI after a semester of school. I felt very welcomed by everybody on the first day of work. I always felt a strong sense of family being a part of the Canfor team. My new responsibilities include performing chemical analyses on samples sent from the mills or customers. The first few weeks I was trained in the use of several analytical techniques which include inductively coupled plasma mass spectroscopy (ICP), ion chromatography, Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FITR) and chemical oxygen demand (COD). All of these analyses are used to identify the composition of a sample and how much of each compound is present.
[Weekly effluent sample]
The goal of my blog is to hopefully create some interest in other chemistry/chemical engineering students who may feel lost in their degree about the pulp and paper industry. I personally did not know much about what a chemical engineer does in his day-to-day job when I joined the program. I want to help students understand what the role of chemical engineer is and help them make a connection with the things that they are learning in the classroom out in the industry. After working at CPI for a couple months, I realize that the industry is much more diverse than I previously anticipated and there are job opportunities for people that come from a variety of disciplines. Over the next two months, I plan to share with you some of my day-to-day experiences working in the lab. I also plan to interview some of my supervisors to get their perspectives about working in the pulp and paper industry.
Stay tuned.
-TW