In the summer
of 1999, Bill Steele left Oklahoma for a job at ORNL. In addition to
chemical analysis expertise, he brought highly useful equipment to ORNL
from the now defunct National Institute for Petroleum Energy Research,
a DOE facility in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. The center, which from 1918
to 1975 had been operated by the Bureau of Mines in the U. S. Department
of the Interior, was closed in November 1998. During its 80 years of
existence, Bartlesville was the site of thermodynamic property measurements
on a wide range of fuels and fuel components. In the 1960s and 1970s
much work was focused on the development of rocket fuel including JP10,
the propulsion fuel for cruise missiles used so effectively during the
Persian Gulf conflict. Now the Bartlesville equipment will provide new
insights in basic and applied research at DOE's new Physical Properties
Research Facility at ORNL.
Tom Schmidt, facility
director, believes that both chemical manufacturers and pharmaceutical
companies may want to use DOE's new user facility at ORNL to obtain
physical property measurements on intermediate chemicals used in their
manufacturing processes. "PPRF is unique because it allows a whole range
of precise property measurements to be performed under one roof on a
small amount of sample," he says. "One of us can measure the heat released
during manufacture of the chemical-information that a manufacturer needs
to prevent runaway reactions and explosions. Down the corridor, another
group member can make vapor pressure measurements that help researchers
predict whether releases of the chemical during manufacture will exceed
toxicity or environmental limits."
"Each piece of
equipment is unique," Steele says. "One piece, an inclined rotating
frictionless piston, is used to measure vapor pressure and to relate
that property to the piston face area and the acceleration due to gravity
at the exact position of the apparatus on the earth's surface. Another
unique instrument, a rotating bomb calorimeter, was originally designed
to precisely measure the energies of combustion of tetra-alkyl lead
compounds when lead was used as an antiknock agent in gasoline." The
full range of the equipment and details on each individual piece, including
measurement type, range of property measurements, and application of
results can be found at http://www.ornl.gov/divisions/ctd/pprf/ppgroup.htm.
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