Life, the Universe, and Everything

When I was a young college student at Boston University, I ran across a book called "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy." Reading it became one of my favorite pass times, especially when I was supposed to be studying.

One of the key characters was a computer, the greatest computer ever created, called Deep Thought. Deep Thought had been constructed to answer The Question … of Life, the Universe, and Everything.

The answer, as it turns out, is ... 42.

I have been engaged in bibliographic research for petroleum engineers and scientists for over a decade. But sometimes, especially when I am researching a technology I am not familiar with, I wonder how Deep Thought would have handled the problem.

I am no Deep Thought ... but I have come up with a number of tricks that may help you find what you need as you sort through the vast technical literature available to us these days.

To illustrate the information points you can derive from a technical article, take a look at “Adsorptive desulfurization of diesel with mesoporous aluminosilicates,” which you can view at:
http://www.scichina.com:8081/sciBe/EN/article/downloadArticleFile.do?attachType=PDF&id=411993

This article, like many technical artices, opens with an introduction that presents in easy to understand language what this research is about, why it was conducted, and how it fits in with the larger technical universe of which it is a part. That in itself provides a useful service to a viewer who is unfamiliar with the technology. In addition, it often provides key words or key phrases that can be used in continuing the search for articles in the same area.

Other useful tidbits include the name of the technical journal in which the article appears; the authors of the article; the organizations within which the authors conduct their research; and, in many cases, the email address of one or more of the authors.

These tidbits provide starting points for other searches. And email addresses, when available, can become the nucleus of a mailing list of experts in the area.

Sci China Ser B-Chem Mar. 2009 vol. 52 no. 3 276-281
Adsorptive desulfurization of diesel with mesoporous aluminosilicates
TANG Huang1,2, LI WangLiang1, LIU QingFen1, GUAN LiLi3, SONG JiaQing3, XING JianMin1† & LIU HuiZhou1
1 National Key Laboratory of Biochemical Engineering, Institute of Process Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China;
2 Graduate University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China;
3 SINOPEC Research Institute of Petroleum Processing, Beijing 100083, China
Introduction
Sulfur oxides released into the atmosphere by combus-tion of diesel seriously pollute the air and our environ-ment. Therefore, the sulfur concentration limitation in the transportation fuels is becoming more and more stringent. Many developed countries such as USA, member countries of EU and Japan regulated the gaso-line and diesel sulfur to below 10－15 μg/g in recent years[1]. Deep desulfurization of diesel is an imperative issue of petrochemical industry in our country. Hydro-desulfurization (HDS)[2] process is very efficient in re-moving simple sulfur compounds, but not effective for dibenzothiophene (DBT) and its derivatives like 4, 6-dimethyldibenzothiophene (4,6-DMDBT). HDS is not suitable for deep desulfurization of diesel, for it requires severe operation conditions, high energy and hydrogen consumption and can decrease the cetane number of diesel[3]. Other deep desulfurization techniques are under research, including adsorptive desulfurization[4], oxida-tion desulfurization[5], biodesulfurization[6] and extrac-tive desulfurization with ionic liquids[7].
Adsorptive desulfurization can be accomplished under ambient conditions, such as room temperature and normal pressure. The reaction rate is very high. Sulfur com-pounds in diesel can be removed by physical adsorption, chemisorption and π-complexation adsorption. Phy-sisorbed sulfur compounds can be easily removed from adsorbents. So, it is easy to regenerate the adsorbents. However the adsorptive selectivity and capability are not high. For chemisorption, adsorptive selectivity and capa-bility are high, but the adsorbents are hard to be regener-ated. Interaction force of π-complexation is between that of physical adsorption and chemisorption.

†Corresponding author (email: jmxing@home.ipe.ac.cn)

Source: http://www.scichina.com:8081/sciBe/EN/article/downloadArticleFile.do?attachType=PDF&id=411993