10,000
I’ve just realised that my blog has just passed the 10,000 views mark yesterday. Hooray! Sadly, I’ve not been updating this site as often as I did when I first started blogging 2.5 years ago. Well, since I have nothing much to rant about I shall just tell you about what’s happening here in Sheffield.
The 1 month of being in Sheffield mark has officially passed by 6 days ago and life is not getting any easier at all. The good things about this year is that I only have three 2 hour lecture a week which is great! The down side is I have 16 hours of allocated group design project time in a week. And our assigned design isn’t anything easy at all.
You’ll by blown away with this word I’m going to ask you which was thrown at me when I first received my assignment description.
Do you know what is CAPROLACTAM?
*faints*
Apparently, it’s a polymer used in the industry to produce the fibre nylon-6 which is used mostly in carpets. After more than 2 weeks of research we’ve found some information but nothing major about the processes used in industry which is the part where we’re supposed to design. We’re expected to design a new process to manufacture caprolactam. Similar to what I and a group of friends designed in my first year i.e. the Benzoic Acid plant. However, the benzoic acid manufacturing process is already made its foundation in industry and there are tons of information on it everywhere.
Caprolactam in the other hand is a relatively new chemical and existing large scale processes are starting to turn a loss as the price of oil pushes towards the US$90 mark. Benzene is the main raw product used in the manufacture of caprolactam and the most common way to get benzene is from petroleum which if prices increase any further world caprolactam production could be jeopardized.
Therefore, it’s our job to find alternative processes to manufacture caprolactam preferably without using benzene and we’ve found a recycling process using carpets. It’s a back process from nylon-6 in the carpets back to caprolactam. Hopefully it’ll be a successful choice as our group is left way behind other groups in the class.
Hopefully, we’ll be able to pull this through with the help of our supervisor of course. Without him, we’re lost from square one. We’ll I’m off to meet him in 30 minutes.
*crosses fingers*
