Work, or something like it

So, what do I do at Promeos?

There are several things I do here that I'm not allowed to be doing, such as blogging, but officially, I work all day on a nice little problem.

First, a little something about the place. Promeos is a company that designs and manufactures porous combustion burners. These creatures are industrial burners that burn fuel inside the pores of a ceramic material. This leads to, among other things, spectacular lighting and fireworks displays every time one of these things is booted. (Will add photo soon)
It has a single office with about twenty five employees, and about sixty fiv- because I find these details as inconsequential as you(I) do, I will skip them.

An interesting tidbit of information, though. The first floor is occupied entirely by the accountants, salesmen and distribution managers. This is what their offices look like:


Ledgers and stationary abound. (Unfortunately, this (the corner) is where I sit nowadays, :( )

The ground floor is taken by the engineers and the workshop people. 'Hands on' is quite an understatement when it comes to describing their approach- these guys are real engineers, ask very relevant questions, and are always trying to find better ways to build stuff. This is what their offices look like. (This one is Mr. Dietmar Tanke's):





























































W00t!

All the accountants run Windows XP, all the engineers run (Take a look at the above photos) SUSE (Linux).

Now, here's what I do: Paper makers need giant rollers to roll paper on and across. In fact, just about any process that creates sheet like materials needs rollers. With paper, its a bit more complicated because you want to heat freshly coated paper as it rolls across, that is, you need a heated roller.

Right now, they have a ridiculous way of doing this. They fill their roller/drum with oil at high pressure, heat it, and then run the paper across. The rollers are about a metre in diameter, and a metre and a half in length. A little calculation shows that they need about three hundred kilograms of oil to fill the drum. Heating three hundred kilograms of pressurized oil to two hundred degrees celcius is a nightmare- it takes three hours to start up the machine!

Enter Promeos. Get rid of the oil, place a porous burner along the length of the cylinder, and run the flue (exhaust) around the perimeter of the cylinder, all the while moving the paper in the opposite direction. Tada.

Well, not yet. They don't know how the fluid flows (all resident engineers are chemists/metallurgists and the like, people with an elementary idea of fluid motion), especially when the paper is running in the opposite direction. That's for me to find out.

My problem, thus, is merely a computation of heat transfer, but depending on how the flow is driven and several other parameters, the heat transferred, the temperatures, mass flow rates and pressure gradients vary by upto three orders of magnitude! Its a strongly entwined problem that requires a considerable amount of intuitive guessing at the start- and I've just started.
The good part, though, is that my work does not end when the heat transfer has been worked out- if that is indeed possible. I have to make the roller!
If things work out reasonably, I will have engaged myself in heat transfer computation, metallurgy, anemometry, elementary chemistry, electronics, hydraulics, materials science, and associated activities that are too numerous to list out. (Real engineering?)

This is what work looked like last Sunday:

This is what work looked like today:

My concerns appear to have grown more realistic in the past week. (No double integrals over non-dimensionalized quantities anymore! The boundary conditions in the real problem are completely unknown, rendering brute force solving useless)

This is what I hope work looks like a month from now:


Fingers crossed.

(UPDATE: I got my first paycheck today. It's the single largest sum of money I've ever handled, and I'm thinking: "I get paid for this ?!")