India's High End Reaction Calorimeter

One of the most advance Reaction Calorimeter - HEL Simular, having the wide capability and many functionalities have been installed at Defence research lab in India at HEMRL, Pune.

By far it is the best Reaction Calorimeter in terms of various capabilities and have been used for the very high explosives chemical reactions studies. It involves high pressure Hastelloys reactor, low pressure Glass reactor, liquid, gas feeds, sampling valves, automatic sampling device, flow controllers, turbidity probe, pH probe, reflux device and all forms of calorimetry such as classical Heat Flow, time saving Power Compensation and Heat reflux calorimetry.

The uniqueness of the system is that it is installed on a single stand which holds both the reactors , having a common stirrer motor, high end chillers and housed in a cabinet with all the safety aspects integrated w.r.t. hardware and software. The various types of reactions like nitration, polymerisation, chlorination, amination to name but a few, have been successfully tried out and the system can cater to many applications for process safety, development & scale-up activities.

Meet our service engineers...

When you call for an HEL Engineer, you are guaranteed attention from our most qualified staff..... :)

I am sure you can all recognise Raj Mann (Service Support Manager) and Trefor Willingham (Senior Mechanical Engineer). They are training to run for the Great Gorilla Run and I am sure you will agree with me that they are looking fit for it....!

Links to their giving pages are provided on the right hand side of this blog.

HEL – A sales eye view......

Hi, Stewart T here (Stewart/Stuart is a popular name at HEL). I thought I’d join in on the blogging (first time, so please be nice!) with a little insight into the day to day life of an HEL account manager......

So apart from driving around in a flash car, wearing a flash suit and wining and dining customers everyday what do I do.......surely it can’t be this good all the time!! I’m sure my colleagues in the UK sales department, Carl, Ian and Stuart would agree that it certainly is not. Take last Friday as a typical example........After a day of planning, emailing, and calling to prospective and existing customers, an early start saw me driving down to the south coast to visit a number of industrial sites and a university department for the day.

Lucky, I managed to beat the exodus to the coast on what was one another beautiful English summers day and arrived at my first visit in good time, a meeting with several industrial process safety chemists to introduce some new HEL calorimetry technology. After a successful presentation and discussion it was on to the next meeting with a customer working with high pressure. High pressure is an area HEL is very active in providing solutions for a large variety of different applications. This meeting is less successful and has more of fact finding feel to it, but some useful information for the future is uncovered and relationships are reinforced.

A quick drive across town with a gourmet Tesco sandwich crammed in en route finds me at my third appointment of the day. This meeting is booked with a university professor looking at a new project in the field of nanoparticles, not an area I have a lot of knowledge in but this comes with the territory and fortunately the academic is happy to fill the details in and outline the aims of the project and grant proposal!!

Having completed the formal part of the day’s business face to face with my customers, the next part of the day is more administrative. I slog through details of all the days meetings, quotes and follow-up information is provided and the infamous Blackberry is set to work answering emails that have arrived throughout the day. You really cannot escape with one of them, a real blessing when out on the road, not so good when you get spam from the US at 2 in the morning!

Finally all I have to do is fight my way back around the M25 to get home where a cold beer, dinner and a weekend of cricket awaits me.

The end of another week in HEL sales!

Gorillas running faster for better chemistry...

What's the connection between Gorillas and HEL products, you ask ? come back soon for the answer ...

Ok, the real connection is that in the best HEL fundraising tradition, Raj Mann (see HEL Raisers...) and Tref Willingham will be joining the London Great Gorilla Run on September 27th. If you know them, you will be aware that they don't need dressing up (proof coming soon...) !

There are many charity runs but none are quite like this – 1,000 people, all dressed up as gorillas and going ape for a day!

Since the first race in 2003, thousands of people have donned their gorilla suits and walked, run or jogged the 7km City of London route that takes in sights such as Tower Bridge and The Tate Modern. Read more about the Gorilla Runs and their purpose at the Gorilla Runs website .

P.S. if you want to donate click here for Raj's giving page

Breaking down barriers with real time, on-line calculation – Process Development using Calorimetry

Reaction calorimetry has been well recognised as a valuable aid to process development. Not only for safety and safe scale up, but also as an aid for guiding the synthetic route and process optimisation. However, uptake by development chemists has been VERY limited, this due partly to cost but more often due to the complexity of the calculations needed for data generation.

HEL has been developing calorimetry solutions for over 21 years and have come up with a new technology that makes calorimetry accessible to development chemists on ANY stirred reactor without special features or adaptations. When a reactor is computer controlled, nothing exceptional is needed – with computer control in place and the availability of temperature data, on-line heat release rate data can be readily generated.

The results are quantitative, rather than just indicative, and available without any effort or additional experimental time for activities such as calibration. When greater accuracy is needed, a heat flow (HF) meter may be used to perform a quick calibration check. This too is made simple and requires no knowledge of calorimetry methodology by the user.

These features can also be integrated into custom reaction calorimeters, including some older existing units. This will enable the users to save time, both by speeding up experiments and eliminating the need for off-line data analysis.

Where this new technology is implemented with a power compensation calorimeter, the on-line analysis will produce exact results without any assumptions being necessary. And for such systems there are no calibrations required. In the case of HF calorimeters, for the most accurate results one calibration is needed, although this is also completely automated and the online calibration calculations are used immediately for the reaction being performed.

Lord's Cricket Ground and other marketing issues

Someone has to be the first to write something in this blog... so I guess it will be me, as it is my idea to start it.

What did I start this Blog for ? well, its all about HEL. About our day to day and also perhaps to improve our own internal communication by sharing our various work experiences. It will be nice to read some anecdotal entries, but also to hear about each other's work, achievements, professional problems, etc. We could get some research results and application notes published here, and let our customers comment and even post their own opinions.

So, what have I been up to ? I just spoke to one of the event organisers in the Lord's Cricket Ground, and arranged for a tour of the grounds at the end of our User Conference on September 30th. She said that there is a very good chance to be able to see both the Long Room and the Players Changing Rooms ! bookings for this event are coming in fast currently. We still have a few more places but the space is limited so hurry if you want to join.

We are also venturing into a new market - and will be exhibiting for the first time at ArabLAB 2009, January 2009 in Dubai, so I have been busy arranging this. Our website is being overhauled and you should be able to see some changes within the next few weeks. In the meantime, you can see some information on some of our new products already there, such as AutoMATE II, Phi-TEC I, and FlowCAT.

Visit again soon for more...