...As
W e See It
Fuel of the Future?
Every automobile owner should be personally interested in our collaborative report this month. I.&E.C.'s readers, with their appreciation for the technical facts, should be doubly interested, for this liquidfuel-from-coal demonstration unit of the Bureau of Mines dramatically illustrates that the process is quite feasible technically today. The article is so timely that it almost hurts us to think about it: formal dedication of the plant takes place in May and we made special arrangements to add operating experience information from final testing right up to the time the issue went on the presses. An enormous volume of information, both chemical and engineering in nature, is crammed into the paper, which is even longer than our usual substantial coverage in this series. The combination of high pressures, over 10,000 pounds per square inch, and the abrasive character of some of the process mixtures should make the engineering of reactors, gaskets, and valves most interesting to design engineers. Incidentally, the papers contributed by Savich, Pelipetz, Budy, Clark, and Storch (page 968) and Weller, Pelipetz, Kuhn, Friedman, and Clark (page 972) present results of other work by the Bureau of Mines on the process.
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Petroleum Plus.
This month's symposium on petroleum additives, which starts on page 886, includes contributions to our knowledge of the chemistry of additivehydrocarbon reactions; the effect of additives for improving performance of gasoline, fuel oil, and lubricating oil; use of additives for improving storage characteristics of petroleum products; and a number of papers on the complicated physicochemical problems involved in formulation of gear greases and lubricants.
Thought for Food.
If Thomas Malthus were living today, he might feel the need to qualify some of his earlier comments about the inevitability of ultimate starvation as the effective limit of, at least, the human part of the earth's population. This year's Perkin Medalist, Carl S. Miner, cites an impressive number of ways in which chemical and biochemical science appear ready to burst the historic shackles of our food resources. Miner's views, which might be considered the physical scientist's perspective today, well deserve their place among the vigorous discussions now going on in this regard. We venture the guess that history will treat his predictions kindly.
Pilot Plants via Module.
Many pilot plants operate to test only a few uniquely designed units, but require numerous other equipment to perform the routine but essential services such as heat transfer, sampling, and metering. Ridgway gives details on page 1082 of a number of these standard designs that have been used extensively in at least one petroleum company.
Other eye-catchers
are papers on thermodynamic properties of hydrocarbon vapors (pages 1037,1048, and 1070), mass transfer in liquid-liquid agitation systems (page 973), a simplified wire screen packing for distillation columns (page 1056), an activity coefficient correction factor nomograph (page 1076), a process for preparation of methoxychlor (page 1027), and the properties of cellulose acetate butyrate strip-coating compositions (page 1065).
For F u r t h e r I n f o r m a t i o n W r i t e
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