Published Resources Details
Journal Article
- Title
- Some chemical engineering contributions from the Government Chemical Laboratories of Western Australia
- In
- Mechanical and Chemical Engineering Transactions
- Imprint
- vol. MC1, Nov 1965
- Abstract
The Chemical Laboratories of the Government of Western Australia consist of six Divisions with titles descriptive of their fields of work. Originally there were three Divisions: Agriculture and Water Supply Division dealing with all chemical aspects of agriculture and of water in a State where rainfall is seasonal and often marginal; Foods, Drugs, Toxicology and Industrial Hygiene including also forensic chemistry; Mineral Division which has played a major role in the development of the great mineral wealth of the State. In 1946 were added a Fuel Technology Division and an Industrial Chemistry Division and in 1960 an Engineering Chemistry Division, to assist the development of secondary industries. It is the Fuel Technology and Engineering Chemistry Divisions that have mainly contributed the engineering aspects of the Laboratories work.
The Laboratories provide a versatile and compact combination of widely drawn skills. A number of successful pieces of research and development of a direct chemical engineering nature or related to other engineering undertakings are described. They are:
- Gas production and coked briquette manufacture from sub-bituminous coal;
- Beneficiation of ilmenite by reduction of its iron oxide content;
- Flash calcination of gypsum to plaster of paris;
- Flash drying of ilmenite and sawdust;
- Beneficiation of lime sands and their calcination to lime.In each instance the primary purpose of the work had been to find a solution to a particular problem rather than to investigate fundamentally. In each instance therefore the outline of method and the main results achieved have been set out without digressing into theoretical investigation or examination made in reaching a particular solution.
This paper deals with the foregoing chemical engineering developments from the Fuel Technology and Engineering Chemistry Divisions of our Laboratories although it is to be understood that this work is dependent on the analytical services of the other Divisions of the Laboratories.