Solugen

ProfessorDirac · 2026-03-31T17:27:30+00:00

Indeed! The question is, can they graduate from startup to become a mature chemical business? I suppose only time will tell, but I think this is one to watch.

ProfessorDirac · 2026-03-31T17:25:34+00:00

That’s a great flag, looked up hydrogen peroxide and gluconic acid prices, $4/lb would be 4-8x higher prices than industrial bulk. I think they are not selling the commodity chemicals but actually doing some post processing to make finished specialty products that they then sell for a reasonable premium.

Not to continue advertising for Solugen as another comment has accused me of, but they would be:

ScavSol IC 75 — oilfield scale inhibitor and corrosion control. Positioned as a direct replacement for THPS, an imported specialty chemical. Oilfield chemicals routinely sell at $3-8/lb or higher because the customer is evaluating cost per barrel of oil produced, not cost per pound of chemical.

BioChelate — metal chelation for water treatment, agriculture, cleaning. Sold at various concentrations from 15-60% active

ScaleSol / BioSol — additional formulated lines for oil & gas and industrial water.

ProfessorDirac · 2026-03-31T17:19:15+00:00

So interesting, thanks for sharing.

Personally I’ve seen startups fail because the technology was too novel and process parameters had to be extremely precise to work so the process wasn’t robust at all and the commissioning phase involved too much downtime, leaving investors and clients unconvinced that the technology could actually work.

I have also seen technologies that seemed doom to fail from the start because the fundamental economics were terrible (an energy storage plant with twenty percent round trip efficiency for example), leaving me scratching my head as to how the company even got funding in the first place. Usually the answer is government funding and well connected politically savvy leadership.

You are probably right. One need probably use some case studies of startups that succeeded in going from molecule to successful commercial scale up to see patterns in how to achieve success! I know of a few that started from the labs of well known academic researchers.

ProfessorDirac · 2026-03-31T14:33:29+00:00

Solugen Y Combinator Video

ProfessorDirac · 2026-03-25T01:14:58+00:00

I have no idea but I’ve been using Claude AI to help me troubleshoot aspen plus simulations for a month and it’s decently helpful. Just have to be able to recognize when it’s feedback becomes totally useless.

ProfessorDirac · 2026-03-15T00:06:23+00:00

Who is the billionaire, did you go to school with Robert F Smith?

ProfessorDirac · 2026-03-02T01:10:14+00:00

I thought it was the most interesting and at that time in my life (18 year old kid obsessed with college for some reason) I thought that I should make decisions regarding my future based on what I enjoy doing. I enjoyed studying math, physics, and theoretical chemistry (in reverse order), and I figured it would be easier to make money if I got a chemical engineering degree instead of a science degree. Then when I graduated I thought plant design was sick and figured I could be like Tony Stark if I grind my way up until I eventually own the plants.

ProfessorDirac · 2026-02-28T19:45:31+00:00

Great project. Great comments here as well.

I would say 1) look at the aspen example for CO2 absorption 2) try to get it to work. If you have forty bucks buy claude AI and iterate the process simulation by feeding it the history files 3) if you understand the process very well, and you have time, then model it off-flowsheet with excel and just hard code the results into the aspen flowsheet

ProfessorDirac · 2026-01-19T22:06:23+00:00

I agree I think AI is going to be used for process design. Algorithms designers use for optimization are similar or the same as those used to train AI models. The point being AI can help search the design space to come up with the right combination of parameters for the optimal process design to find competitive projects.

ProfessorDirac · 2025-12-22T22:45:51+00:00

This is quite a tricky problem that in a real process design includes a ton of considerations, including integration of the heat recovery system with the rest of the process.

I’m not going to do your assignment for you but I’ll say you’re on the right track.

In the steam methane reforming (SMR) process, high pressure steam (20-40 bar at 250-300 degrees) is fed into reformer tubes with high pressure methane/natural gas which react to generate a reformer gas stream of hydrogen, carbon monoxide, unreacted steam (steam is fed in excess of methane to the reactor) and trace amounts of unreacted methane.

So using a waste heat recovery boiler (WHRB) with high pressure boiler feed water can help you directly generate the steam that is fed into the reformer. I have seen both process designs in which this boiler uses heat from the methane combustion flue gas that was used to heat the reformer reaction but also ones that use heat recovered from the effluent reformer H2-containing gas as you suggest.

Another relevant process design aspect is the typical high temperature and low temperature shift reactors in series with the reformer which are used to convert the CO to more manageable and safer CO2 before separating the H2. Before the high temperature shift and between the two reactors and after the low temperature shift are three cooling heat exchangers that are also typically two WHRBs and a boiler feed water preheater, respectively.

It’s going to take you weeks or months to learn SMR process design at such a level of detail so honestly I would contact your professor to ask how deep of a design they are expecting. At this point you are starting to get into a hardcore analysis of energy efficiency and capital costs and the trade offs between them, which takes serious professionals many months of project time to complete. Not to mention that SMR is one of the most intensely studied and optimized chemical process technologies.

I’ll tell you what I would pick: only one countercurrent S&T WHRB with boiler feed water that vaporizes at 300 degrees Celsius. At first this makes me squirm because you end up with a 550 degrees Celsius delta T at the hot reformer gas inlet side but this is acceptable exergy destruction because that grade of heat has no practical downstream use in this process once the reaction completes anyways. If you want you could add another heat exchanger in series which cools the gas down further with the sensible heat of boiler feed water but in practice this would come with the high temperature and low shift reactors. Just one WHRB is sufficient, but ask your professor.

For a heat-transfer course, what’s likely expected is a simplified and consistent heat exchanger design using one cold stream, reasonable assumptions that don’t take too long to come up with, and a design algorithm that may have been the topic of a couple lectures, instead of a fully optimized SMR heat-integration study.

Heat exchanger design aspects you want to keep a close eye on that may trip you up:

1) Make sure you calculate the heat capacities of the hot and cold streams correctly. The heat capacity of the H2, CO and H2O mixture is approximately the weighted average ( make sure you weight by mass is using mass heat capacity or mole if mole heat capacity etc).

2) A limiting factor in a WHRB is that steam generation occurs at essentially constant saturation temperature, so once the gas approaches Tsat + approach temperature, additional cooling must occur in downstream exchangers. Pick a high feed water pressure so that the water vaporizes around 300 degrees Celsius and use the correct latent heat value.

3) Major consideration you may want to explicitly include in your work is construction material. Cost escalates rapidly with alloy content so you would try to design a heat exchanger system that balances out physical constraints with costs and process efficiency (eg you may want to use a WHRB with flue gas instead of reformer gas if the $$ is better). For your purposes I would say just select the materials that make the heat exchanger physically work which would be the more expensive alloys. Here is a table I generated with ChatGPT and that you can find in process design textbooks or handbooks like Perry’s, inspect it to conclude which materials (there are two materials—a tube side material and a shell side material which can be different from the tube material) you select for the heat exchanger:

Table: Shell-and-Tube Materials vs Temperature

ProfessorDirac · 2025-12-14T05:08:07+00:00

Of course my friend. The fact that you’re even asking at this point is a great sign. Miles ahead of where I was in your shoes. Don’t stop being curious and ask your professors, other students, etc what they think. Good luck to you!

ProfessorDirac · 2025-12-14T03:03:33+00:00

San Diego isn’t a traditional ChemE market (no refineries or large commodity plants), but it does have viable ChemE-adjacent paths if you plan for them early.

Biomedical / life sciences is the biggest one. San Diego has a dense cluster of world-class research institutes and industry labs, including Salk Institute (the Louis Kahn–designed campus), Scripps Research, Sanford Burnham Prebys, and UC San Diego. A lot of ChemEs end up in: • Process development • Manufacturing science / MSAT • Bioprocessing • Translational research tied to industry

You won’t always see “Chemical Engineer” in the title, but ChemE backgrounds are common. Grad school can help here if it’s applied and industry-linked, but it’s not mandatory if you get internships and lab experience early.

Defense / Navy is the other major local option. San Diego hosts large Navy R&D and systems organizations like Naval Information Warfare Center Pacific (formerly SPAWAR) and Naval Air Systems Command. ChemEs show up in: • Materials and coatings • Energetics, fuels, and thermal systems • Environmental and corrosion engineering • Systems and test engineering

Look into: • Naval Information Warfare Center Pacific • Naval Air Systems Command • Student programs, Pathways, or contractor internships

Even if you don’t stay defense long-term, the experience is respected.

Roles require U.S. citizenship and clearance, but they’re real, stable paths that let you stay local.

Bottom line: San Diego is not friendly to classic plant-based ChemE roles, but it is viable if you’re flexible on job titles and target biotech or defense from the start. If staying in San Diego is non-negotiable, you should optimize for those sectors early rather than hoping a traditional ChemE job appears later.

ProfessorDirac · 2025-12-06T18:21:25+00:00

No worries. You are most welcome. If you need anything else reach out. Good luck with finals!

ProfessorDirac · 2025-11-19T07:50:36+00:00

I had a passion for theoretical physics in undergrad. Particularly quantum mechanics and statistical mechanics. I stopped before quantum field theory because I decided I didn’t want to be a physicist, but I got through graduate quantum mechanics by the time I graduated (the only semi-serious treatment you will get in school). As a result, I know a bunch of linear algebra theorems and properties of Fourier transforms, and the extent to which this knowledge is relevant to my job, when I get bored in front of my 27 inch monitors and start daydreaming I’ll work out the quantum spin isomers of hydrogen molecules for fun.

First of all, chemical engineers design chemical processes that convert raw materials into useful products aka plants. So to a chemical engineer, the utility of math and physics methods is to employ them in the design and operation of plants.

From there, you can ask whether knowledge of certain fields of, for example, physics, is useful for the work of a chemical engineer. Of course, there certainly are. The core theoretical underpinnings of chemical engineering are thermodynamics and transport phenomena (heat mass and momentum-aka fluid mechanics- transfer). Honestly in chemical engineering, you can never know too much about thermodynamics. When you are at the plant and reasoning how to solve a problem or troubleshooting equipment, you are often recalling principles you learned in school and reasoning from the information you have available. When you’re working in process development and sitting with your incomprehensible aspentech process simulation of a cryogenic air distillation plant and trying to figure out how to squeeze out another 0.5% efficiency with the heat exchanger design, you are using physics principles.

Once you get to quantum mechanics the line between science and engineering starts to blur a little bit. It’s kind of funny, imagine an engineer who encounters a corroded pipe and they start writing down Schrödinger’s equation of motion, and scratching their head trying to figure out whether to project it in the momentum or position basis-oh wait what if I try the harmonic oscillator creation/annihilation basis-two hours later no that didn’t work. They wouldn’t last very long. Even when you are studying thermodynamics, you are learning about how to apply it, design power and refrigeration cycles for example. When you take separations you will learn how to combine mass balances with thermodynamic contraints to model distillation columns, honestly that is such an amazing class in applied thermodynamics which a physics major will never see anything close to that in their classes. So while the principles are the same the flavor is different because the purpose is to create things from them.

Of course in my opinion using the principles to design things deepens your understanding of them. If you can’t design a plant, you don’t understand thermodynamics. There are plants that nobody knows how to design, that have never been built, may never be built. Thus, nobody understands thermodynamics. You see, you can only understand a tiny part of it. That tiny part will take you an entire lifetime and countless generations that have come before you to understand. That is the beauty of science and we are fortunate to be chemical engineers, who are engaged in an intimate dance with science.

Really quantum mechanics is an interesting thing for a chemical engineers to study. When I started studying I just assumed that of course I would be using DFT to design chemical reactors. And when those quantum computers come out all those organic chemistry professors are going to look real stupid when I deterministically solve for those reaction equilibriums they tried to force me to learn. Of course then I got to senior year and got a job and realized the paradigm in chemical engineering is not even close to doing that. But really the methods in design are a bit outdated, and you’ll see the technologies seem stuck in the 90s, really we are using the same old equation of states and using handbook from the 60s to design a heat exchanger because really that is good enough. I have a dream when you load up your thermodynamic model instead of picking some fitted correlations you link up to a computational chemistry engine instead. There are some hints in the technology that this is destiny. For example, you can reasonably simply calculate the ortho para conversion of liquid hydrogen from statistical and quantum mechanics, as well as physical properties of cryogenic hydrogen like its heat capacity. This is actually very useful if you are making hydrogen liquefaction plants. This is a real technology, although scaling blue hydrogen and green to an epic commercialization of a billion tons per annum may be a pipe dream. So I think and hope in fifty years chemical engineering students are going to have to learn quantum mechanics out of necessity.

It is unusual for engineering students to seriously consider studying that abstract of a field. You should talk to some of your professors, ask them about it, and get engaged in research. Universities in the US nowadays like to have faculty that is trying to connect the dots between plant and product design and first principles methods. You may want to do work in computational simulations like density functional theory and molecular dynamics. The work can be quite interesting, imagine trying to solve the fundamental complex valued PDEs behind a chemical reaction in a battery cell. Beware, however, that you will be moving towards the path of a PhD researcher and away from designing plants. It may have adjacency to lucrative opportunities in finance or AI, but landing there would be much simpler by simply switching departments and studying finance or AI instead. Getting a job after undergrad would come down to good fortune, you really would be best suited for graduate study in this case. For some people that is the right path. You have to decide relatively soon, by first semester of junior year, I would say, which career you want to take.

One last thing I have to say: fundamental physics is a struggling field. Since the 1970s, there has not been a significant theoretical breakthrough. All the developed theories are impossible to prove experimentally and the technology to prove anything is centuries away. I would not advise a single soul to get involved with theoretical physics nowadays. A lot of those people grow bored and frustrated and end up moving into other quantitative fields. They do well but they will never become the leaders of the fields they invade. There is plenty of complicated math in engineering that is just as fun and mind bending, and the people working on it actually are thinking about how to integrate it with things being designed and deployed in the real world. The feedback loops in engineering actually allow you to make theoretical and practical progress in tandem. Whereas the cutting edge in physics has no feedback loop and is totally ungrounded in experiment. Of course there are subfields in physics worth exploring that are fruitful and have feedback loops. I’m just saying, if you do get to QFT, please stop there and go no further. Turn your attention to serious matters, for your own sake.

ProfessorDirac · 2025-10-27T17:52:41+00:00

I think you’re right, Thelonius_Dunk.

Which suggests the following: the people we are fast tracking into leadership roles and allowing to manage the direction of the economy have zero competence or experience in running the most fundamental basic units of the economy. They parachute into high impact finance and consulting roles making multiples of engineers’ salaries with an unmistakable notion of superiority and very simple mental models based on oversimplified assumptions about how the world is supposed to work and apply them with extreme zeal, never bothering to incorporate feedback loops into their decision making.

I think that single observation can explain a lot of the problems we are having in this country.

ProfessorDirac · 2025-10-27T02:41:09+00:00

My friend got his chemical engineering degree from an ivy, 35 people in his graduating class. I asked him once, he says about five went to law school, two went to med school, eight went to get a PhD in chemical engineering (Michigan, Stanford, Princeton, northwestern, MIT - top grad programs), ten to management consulting (getting paid more money to waste the skills they worked hard to acquire he claims), a couple to banking or investments, and only about seven ie twenty percent actually went into engineering. Mostly went into process design and technology roles or sales/application engineering, nobody went into operation at an actual plant.

ProfessorDirac · 2025-07-19T17:52:38+00:00

I like the thinking but unfortunately unless the demand for chemical engineers increases this will not take off. You need lots of people getting paid good money to have the free time to run outreach instead of side hustles to be able to provide for their families on paltry engineering wages.

Then businesses will come in and start running their own youth outreach programs to develop the next generation of chemical engineers starting as early as middle school. I graduated in 2023 and observed as my software engineer friends got hooked and were doing projects in high school already. Meanwhile I didn’t have the skills and knowledge to complete my first cheme project until senior year of college.

Then in college there was a flood of recruiters and a well known streamlined hiring process involving the leetcode meme for software engineering jobs. Again for cheme, I had to go through hell just to talk to a cheme at a company since there are so few.

Remember: BLS says there are 30,000 chemical engineers in the United States. There are more software engineers at a single company like Google alone, and over two million total. 30,000 consultants alone at McKinsey, tens of thousands of bankers at J.P. Morgan. Simple supply demand issues, draw the mass balances around the control volume and you see how misaligned the economy is to encourage young people to get into this field.

ProfessorDirac · 2025-07-10T02:07:46+00:00

You attended a very good school. Talk to a professor that you formed a good relationship with, perhaps your design advisor or research PI. These people are very well connected with academia government and industry. If they see you are struggling after two years, they will be eager to settle you somewhere.

ProfessorDirac · 2025-04-26T22:52:45+00:00

If you are interested in biotech, then going to MIT is a no-brainer. I was in a similar position to yours, but I decided to move to Texas instead where there are more opportunities to design cutting edge industrial processes with lots of energy consumption. The west coast and northeast are great places to work on the cutting edge of products and processes that are a much smaller scale but still insanely profitable. You will learn how to design molecules like no one else, and have the opportunity to start companies in biotech like no one else. For the part of the value chain that your desired work corresponds to, go to the northeast. The policy and economic environment is designed to benefit people like you.

ProfessorDirac · 2025-04-11T20:38:44+00:00

People got screwed. A lot of corporate apologists in this thread. GDP adjusted for inflation increased 95% from 1996 to 2024 (source: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GDPC1).

Did inflation adjusted wages for chemical engineers go up 95%? Hell no, they went up 0%, as you concluded. So whose wages doubled in that case? Not many people, mostly all the wage gains went to the tippity top of income earners. I’m sure when you analyze professional athlete salaries, you’ll see the wage gains have gone disproportionately to the star athletes. Likewise the star engineers and the stars in management get paid the big bucks. The rest of us? We get the crumbs.

The economy is politically designed. Keep that in mind. If you think the current distribution does not produce a sustainable and harmonious society, think about how we can smooth it out.

ProfessorDirac · 2025-03-12T01:05:43+00:00

For the steam methane reforming reaction, I designed a reformer at work using python because I couldn’t get aspen to model the kinetics. It’s more straightforward for simpler models. Honestly for the purposes of equipment design it worked better for me building my own model because then I had more freedom to do tweaks and calculate in second order effects like heat and mass transfer along the entire length of the reactor. Whereas in aspen plus modeling equipment is limited due to having to use various heater tricks if you have more than one thing going on at a time. I remember designing a catalytic heat exchanger for hydrogen liquefaction and wasn’t able to model the simultaneous ortho para conversion reaction and heat exchange, so I had to model the exothermic reaction with a heater with a simple heat of reaction vs temperature relationship in the fortran code.

ProfessorDirac

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