So, I’ve been asked by a few people now, “ I know that you have a new job in a place called Stowmarket, but what do you actually do?” So I thought I would write about it. The short and boring answer is that I make Ferro-Molybdenum using an aluminothermic reaction. This however poses two problems. One, most people don’t have a clue what Ferro-Molybdenum is, and two, it just doesn’t sound like nearly as much of a good time as it really is.
(think like this but much bigger scale (7 tonnes) and in a big bucket, not cutting a car in half)
The better answer is that I’m an a mad scientist. See, it already sounds more exciting, but I can’t start there, first I need to like all stories, at the beginning.
I work for Climax Molybdenum in a small facility in the UK that is a subsidiary of the company I used to work for Freeport McMoRan. It’s actually so small that most FMI employees have never heard of it. We have approximately 75 total employees of which, three are at all technical. One is me, as the engineer, the second is the lab supervisor (Oddly enough not his technicians though), and the third is my boss (a chemical engineer by trade, but spends all his day managing people). And with my arrival, our manager has decided that the group has apparently become big enough to be called the “Techno-Weenies.” To put it into perspective, each week I send out a few graphs that show key process variables so that we can monitor how we ran the last week in comparison to how we normally run. Two days ago, one of the people that I send those out to stopped me and thanked me for sending them out to him and that they were quite neat looking, but he had no idea whatsoever what he was looking at. As in, didn’t know why we would have a graph of % Molybdenum in our final product, even thought that’s what we sell. I know that this doesn't make sense why I'm telling you this, but bear with me. Why I'm explaining this is just to explain that most of my coleagues know that we do what we do, but haven't got a good understanding of why or how it works. Which is what I'm suppose to do. This has it’s advantages.
The main advantage is that when we want to switch to a new material I get to test it. I know, this doesn’t sound too exciting, but in order to do these tests, I’ve been given a cement mixer and told to try and make mixtures of about 10 kilograms of these explosives (Because you can’t possibly hope to learn anything from anything smaller, and quite frankly when I tried the next size larger I may have had a bit of a “Rapid detonation of the reaction materials” or simply put a big bang) in a shed in the back of the property, that has been renamed sean's boom boom shed, I wonder why? This is where the mad scientist comes in. I spend my day concocting different mixtures of explosives and then igniting them in a sand lined garbage can. The bounds of what I can try are only limited to what I think may work. Some examples of this are that we currently use calcium fluoride in our reaction, but it has the adverse side effect of making gas that isn’t great for the environment. This means that while it is helpful in the reaction, the cost of having to control and prevent the gas from escaping makes it almost not worth using. So, I have been told to find a replacement. Suggestions have ranged from just taking it out and seeing what happens to adding Borax, the laundry detergent. Now, I generally know what’s going to happen before, otherwise I would be decently terrible at my job. But, when someone who doesn’t know what I’m doing, which is most of the site, walks up to me and I’m covered with dust with a cement mixer and a garbage can shooting sparks eight feet into the air. Explaining it can become quite difficult and hence I get quickly labelled a mad scientist.
Like I said, while what I do is make Ferro-Molybdenum. I am really a mad scientist. So if you hear about an explosion tragically involving an engineer in eastern England you won't have to ask any questions about what happened.
