Blog Entry #1

Over the past few weeks from week 1 to 3, I have learnt many things from this module. 

For our theory lessons, I learnt about chemical product classification which categorizes chemical products into the 4 different categories: commodities, molecular products, micro-structured products and chemical devices. This can help to differentiate chemical products and their designs or purposes. For example, chemical products under commodities are typically made through reaction engineering and unit operations whereas chemical products under molecular products are discovered and made through research.

Relating to the design of chemical products, I also learnt about the use of "pain points", which are about specific problems that users may face when using a product. For example, when using online shopping apps, one "pain point" that users may experience is that they may find it difficult to communicate to the sellers when they encounter issues with the product that they have bought.

During the brainstorming for ideas for potential chemical product designs, my group had a common goal of wanting to tackle global warming and climate change. This then led to many different ideas, one of which was a automatic planter box before we settled on the concept of combining an aquarium filter with a planter box (picture below for reference). This came about as one of my classmates had brought about the "pain point" which aquarium owners faced which was that the fish would secrete ammonia, a chemical which is toxic for the inhabitants in the tank, and that it can be troublesome to remove. By combining the aquarium filter and planter box together, the plant can then absorb the ammonia in the tank for nutrients while simultaneously photosynthesizing using the carbon dioxide in the air, thereby helping to mitigate climate change.

While we brainstormed, we also had to look for references and sources relating to our product idea where we applied what we learnt about literature review, which I found was quite pivotal as it helped to analyze the information that we had gathered in a organized and concise manner. This helped us to narrow down the scope of information that we found and ensured that the data correlated to each other as well as that they were credible as some of the sources had to be peer reviewed journals.

For our practical lesson in week 3, we learnt more about reverse engineering where we took apart a coffee machine to find out more about its working principles and product design. Through the lesson, we found out that the coffee machine worked with the use of an air pump, which utilized bubbles to push the water through a tube into the coffee filter which then dissolved the coffee powder to make coffee. 

Thereafter, we took what we learnt from the reverse engineering of the coffee machine and applied the same concept to make our own air pump, where we used a various equipment such as a U-tube and beaker (as seen in the picture below). We then also experimented on the ratio of submergence length with the total length of the pipe to find out what would increase the flowrate of the water into the beaker.