The 1071st General Monthly Meeting - April 1998.
The AGM and The Presidential Address
Applied Scientific Research: I Did It My Way
In his 1998 Presidential Address Dr. Edmund Potter drew upon his 40 years of research for industry to illustrate that the applied scientist must be prepared to fill in gaps in fundamentals if some industrial problems are to be overcome.
For example, before a once-serious international problem with tube pitting in high pressure steam boilers could be solved, it was necessary to discover how the uneven surface of a new steel tube could protect itself with a stable film of its own corrosion product, magnetite, when that oxide occupies over double the volume of the steel consumed to produce it. Research showed that the additional volume is expelled ionically from the slowly growing film, which thereby forms without suffering significant mechanical stress. This balance is profoundly disturbed by local enrichment of trace contaminants in the water boiling on the tube wall, specifically certain metallic chlorides unstable at the 300 - 350°C operating temperatures. (Chem. & Ind., 1963, p1768, Nov. 2 issue)
In another illustrated example the speaker invoked the process of electrostatic precipitation, which for nearly a century has cleared flowing industrial gas of particles by their electrification and attraction to earthed plates from which accumulated powder is neatly detached into hoppers below. The efficiency equation for the process had been deduced by Deutsch in 1922, but engineers insisted it could only be used for reliably designing industrial precipitators after reference to their confidential experiences with earlier successes and failures. However, a logical extension of the Deutsch equation was deduced some 50 years later, and this led to a quantitative demonstration of the effects of the major operating variables, thus producing a principled basis for sizing large-scale plant for a secure environmental outcome. (J. Air Pollut. Control Assoc., 1978, 28, 40)
Dr Edmund Potter
Outgoing President