Dear Diary,
What a week it has been! I’m still working with FoMD (Fouling of Membrane Distillation) and I had two computer programs fighting over me.
We were able to work out all the kinks that FoMD was displaying last week. FoMD is now running like the dream experiment that I knew it was. In fact, FoMD has become so reliable that I can now set it up to run throughout the night and when I return in the morning FoMD greets me with some rather thrilling data. Usually by the time I get in, FoMD has already crashed a couple of hours earlier due to all that saltiness coating the membrane but FoMD keeps on trying to pass water through the membrane. I’m pretty sure FoMD will do anything to make me happy…Maybe I’ll get FoMD to do a bank heist for me.
Well, Diary, I guess I should talk a little about the data that FoMD is producing for me. We’ve been starting with a water/salt concentration that is two times the starting concentration; one times concentration is approximately 1.2 kg of salt per liter of water. By starting at two times this it makes sure FoMD will crash in a timely manner and before too much water is lost to evaporation. As expected, FoMD consistently crashes around 2.8x the initial concentration meaning there is too much salt on FoMD’s membrane to effectively remove water from the briny mixture. But bless its heart, FoMD keeps on chugging along and continues to remove water throughout the night.
When not working with FoMD I am working on computer programs to determine when different ions will precipitate out of the briny liquid based on concentration amount. There are two different programs vying for my usage and, Diary, I certainly have felt like the Belle of the ball this week; although the ball is a little decrepit. The first program is Visual MINTEQ which was originally released in 2010 but it’s had a few version releases or “face-lifts” since then. The other programing competing for my attention is MINTEQA2 which was originally released around 1991, hasn’t had a face-lift since 2006, and cannot run on anything newer than Windows XP (yes, I said “newer than”). Visual MINTEQ was created using the MINTEQA2 program to have a much cleaner interface and run on newer computers. In the computer world, both of these programs are extremely old and it feels like I have both Michael Douglas (Visual MINTEQ) and Kirk Douglas (MINTEQA2) fighting over me. The reason I had to use both programs was because Visual MINTEQ, while nice and clean, is only programmed to produce reliable data up to a maximum temperature of 40oC and I need to produce data for water at 65oC. MINTEQA2 can create data reliable up to a simulated temperature of 100oC but is run through the MS-DOS screen which requires you to know exactly what you need to know a bunch of keywords to run the program since it doesn’t have an actual interface. If you don’t know what to type there is fortunately several documents that combine to create a 200-page manual with some conflicting information and some completely incorrect information. On top of that, the final data is displayed using notebook and also requires the manual to understand what you are looking at.
As the Belle of this program ball I certainly did have my choice of inferiorities to choose from. I decided to put the same simulated data into both programs at 20oC, 40oC, and 65oC to compare how their answers changed as Visual MINTEQ got out of its reliable range. After comparing the data, I had my The Bachelor moment and I gave a rose to … [COMERCIAL BREAK] … And now back to The Bachelor: Scientific Computer Programs edition… I gave a rose to Visual MINTEQ. It turns out Visual MINTEQ is still reliable enough at the necessary 65oC and I’m a sucker for a clean interface.
Now Visual MINTEQ and I can create graphs of the percentage of ions dissolved in water as the salt concentration increases. I am also working with FoMD at the same time so as long as the two don’t find out about each other everything should continue smoothly.
Until next week, Diary – Chay.