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Substantia
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This is an Open Access Journal

Open Access journal
ISSN (Online) 2532-3997
Published by Firenze University Press

[36 journals]

Artificial Intelligence vs. Natural Stupidity
- Authors: Pierandrea Lo Nostro
  Pages: 5 - 6
  Abstract: The number of articles, contributions, TV reports and tweets, squeaks and cheeps on the social networks that deal with the emerging and invasive role of artificial intelligence (AI) in several aspects of our life is increasing enormously, day by day. Like for other hot issues, the use of AI has bright and dark sides. Some are sincerely excited by the potential beneficial outcomes of its applications, others are scared by the potential drawbacks, including some challenging limitations to human freedom. AI is an incredibly powerful machine. It can make calculations and infer conclusions starting from huge datasets and with such a speed that is absolutely inconceivable for a human being. However the history of technology teaches us that the problem is always in the mind and in the hands of the user and, particularly in this case, of the developer. It is not necessary to be sluggishly reluctant to accept innovations and changes to advance serious doubts on the consequences of AI. Some of these effects are, at the moment, unforeseeable.
  PubDate: 2023-07-25
  DOI: 10.36253/Substantia-2250
  Issue No: Vol. 7, No. 2 (2023)
Chemical Demulsification of Oil-in-Water Emulsion from Gas Condensate
Field
- Authors: Habineswaran Rajan, Nur’aini Raman Yusuf, Dzeti Farhah Mohsim, Nor Hadhirah Bt Halim
  Pages: 7 - 19
  Abstract: Produced water, also known as oily wastewater, is one of the major wastes in the oil and gas industry. During the hydrocarbon production, formation of emulsion takes place such as oil-in-water emulsion which has a huge financial effect on the sector. Oil and gas industry seeks highly effective and reasonable demulsifying chemicals to separate the oil-in-water emulsions into water and crude oil. Thus, in this publication, resin alkoxylate, cationic polyamine, cationic surfactant and ethylene oxide/propylene oxide (EO/PO) block copolymers are utilized to resolve the oil-in-water emulsion from a gas condensate field. According to the findings of preliminary screening, a unique demulsifier DB was formulated by incorporating resin alkoxylate and cationic surfactant at an optimal weight percentage ratio. Demulsification efficiency (De) of 96 % based on measurement of turbidity was attained after treating the oil-in-water (O/W) emulsion with demulsifier DB at a dosage of 7 ppm. To determine the demulsifier's efficiency further, the oil-in-water content (OiW) of the produced water was evaluated after the treatment with demulsifier DB. Oil removal efficiency (ORe) of 90% was achieved as the formulated demulsifier DB reduced the oil-in-water content (OiW) of O/W emulsion from 1008.3 ppm to 97.1 ppm within 15 minutes at the dosage of 7 ppm. Furthermore, interfacial tension (IFT) and Turbiscan analysis were performed to further study the demulsification process of blank sample and the addition of the demulsifier DB at the optimized dosage of 7 ppm. At demulsifier DB dosage of 7 ppm, the interfacial tension between oil and water reduced significantly compared to blank sample from 24.98 mN/m to 9.38 mN/m. The produced water sample after treatment with 7 ppm of demulsifier DB resulted in a significant increase of Turbiscan Stability Index (TSI) value of 8 which indicates the rate at which the separation of oil and water occurred. The attained results of IFT and Turbiscan analysis further validate that mixed surfactant system is more efficient than single surfactant system. By combining surfactants with different functional groups, mixed surfactant systems can exhibit greater surface activity than single surfactants.
  PubDate: 2023-04-20
  DOI: 10.36253/Substantia-2035
  Issue No: Vol. 7, No. 2 (2023)
Demulsifier Selection Guideline for Destabilizing Water-in-Oil Emulsion
for both non-EOR and EOR Application
- Authors: Nor Hadhirah Halim, Ismail M. Saaid, Sai Ravindra Panuganti
  Pages: 21 - 33
  Abstract: The most common method for resolving water-in-oil (W/O) emulsion is chemical demulsification. Bottle test is a recommended procedure to analyze a combination of essential parameters such as the demulsifier dosage, residence time, heat, degree of agitation to generate the emulsion and agitation effects after demulsifier injection. It is an extensive and time-consuming selection procedure. Furthermore, the previous demulsifier selection guideline reported in the literature had limitations and was not suitable for the Southeast Asia region. This study describes the development of a new demulsifier selection guideline that relates the demulsifier properties to the crude oil characteristics and is more representative for resolving emulsions in Southeast Asia environment. In developing the selection guideline, four types of synthetic crude were used, with the crude API ranging from 27° to 40°. Sixteen demulsifiers with a relative solubility number (RSN) ranging from 11 to 21 were evaluated comprising resin alkoxylate and modified polyol base demulsifiers. An emulsion test matrix was developed by creating emulsions with different wax contents, asphaltene content and solid contents in the crude oil; then, the demulsifier was screened for all the matrices. Based on the demulsification bottle test completion for all the test matrices, the demulsifier selection guideline was developed and then validated with the blind test in resolving emulsions from the actual crude. The validation results achieved an 86.7% match rate between the guideline output and the lab experimental result. This proved that good agreement had been established between the demulsifier properties and the crude characteristics.
  PubDate: 2023-06-19
  DOI: 10.36253/Substantia-2135
  Issue No: Vol. 7, No. 2 (2023)
A Role for Bose-Einstein Condensation in Astrophysics
- Authors: Barry W. Ninham, Iver Brevik, Oleksandr I. Malyi, Mathias Boström
  Pages: 35 - 39
  Abstract: We revive a 60-year-old idea that might explain a remarkable new observation of a periodic low-frequency radio emission from a source at galactic distances (GLEAM-X J162759.5-523504.3). It derives from the observation that a high-density high-temperature charged boson plasma is a superconducting superfluid with a Meissner effect.
  PubDate: 2023-06-05
  DOI: 10.36253/Substantia-2091
  Issue No: Vol. 7, No. 2 (2023)
Professors Trost and Sheldon’s Promotion of Catalytic Technologies, Atom
Economy, and the E-Factor Metrics in Synthetic Organic Chemistry and the
Fine Chemical and Pharmaceutical Industries, to Speed the Early Evolution
of “Green Chemistry”
- Authors: Mark A. Murphy
  Pages: 41 - 55
  Abstract: The Academic chemical literature (and much current teaching to University Students) still often describes “Green Chemistry,” as having originated in the late 1990s from the United States EPA, the “12 Principles of Green Chemistry”, and/or Academia. But all of the “12 Principles” had already been in “un-enunciated” Industrial practice and had produced many commercialized examples of environmentally favorable chemical products and processes in major segments of Industry, long before the 1990s. This article briefly reviews the early 1990s publications of Professor Barry Trost and Roger Sheldon that spread awareness of the importance of catalysis to the evolving “Green Chemical” concepts of “Atom Economy”, the “E-Factor” metrics, and into Academic “Green Chemistry” research. Trost and Sheldon’s publications admitted that catalysis and “Atom Economy” had been in practice in the commodity chemicals industry for decades, but encouraged more use of those techniques and concepts in the Fine Chemical and Pharmaceutical industry segments, and into Academic research and the teaching of organic chemistry, years before the words “Green Chemistry” or the “12 Principles” came into literature use. Graphical Abstract: Roger A. Sheldon, The Royal Society, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported, Wikimedia Commons Barry M. Trost, Photographer: Armin Kübelbeck, CC-BY-SA, Wikimedia Commons Atom Economy, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International, Wikimedia Commons
  PubDate: 2023-07-11
  DOI: 10.36253/Substantia-2140
  Issue No: Vol. 7, No. 2 (2023)
The Italian Neo-Idealists and Federigo Enriques
- Authors: Luca Nicotra
  Pages: 57 - 82
  Abstract: The controversy that between 1908 and 1912 saw Benedetto Croce and Giovanni Gentile opposed on one side and Federigo Enriques on the other did not actually have a conclusive episode, but its end was perceived, for its results on culture, on society and teaching in Italy, as a "defeat" of Enriques. A more careful examination of the events and of the historical context in which it took place seems, however, to clearly demonstrate that we can speak not of a personal defeat of the great mathematician from Livorno, but rather of a defeat of the commendable attempts at cultural and social modernization of Italy in an international perspective, of which Enriques was not the only actor but certainly the most exposed. Such intentions were crushed by the myopic provincial conservatism of Italian neo-idealism, favored by the fascist regime, concerned only with affirming in the world an alleged autarkic national cultural superiority, based on the traditional literary-humanistic culture, ignoring the progress of the new technical-scientific thought, due to its nature instead placed in an international context.
  PubDate: 2023-07-03
  DOI: 10.36253/Substantia-2177
  Issue No: Vol. 7, No. 2 (2023)
Enzo Ferroni (1921-2007): the History of an Eclectic Chemist
- Authors: Luigi Dei
  Pages: 83 - 100
  Abstract: Enzo Ferroni (Florence, 25 March 1921 – 9 April 2007) was an Italian chemist, full professor in physical chemistry at the University of Florence, where he served as Rector from 1976 to 1979, a renowned international scientist who initiated a new branch of chemistry, that applied to cultural heritage conservation. The history of his scientific and academic life offers a particular interest in a half-century cross-section of the history of chemistry in Italy and the entire world. In particular, Ferroni developed the colloids, surface, and interface chemistry in Italy immediately after the Second World War in a country where it was almost non-existent, sensing the extraordinary potential of this branch of chemistry in the fields of basic and applied research. This paper aims to reconstruct the history of this eclectic chemist starting from his pioneering studies in Italy on colloids, surfaces, and interfaces that, after the Second World War, came to be widely popular within the international scientific literature following three milestones represented by the studies of the Nobel laureates in chemistry, Richard A. Zsigmondy (1925), Theodor Svedberg (1926), and Irving Langmuir (1932). Enzo Ferroni’s far-sighted and visionary ideas concerning the investigation of these systems and others with biological implications by the nascent resonance spectroscopies and surface diffraction techniques were recognised and underlined as the revolutionary approach by ever more sophisticated instrumentations that were to characterise chemistry research to this day. The consecration of the extraordinary potential and peculiarities of colloids, surfaces, and interfaces would come to fruition in 1991 with the Nobel laureate in physics Pierre-Gilles de Gennes, who finally discovered that “the methods developed to study ordinary phenomena in simple systems can be generalised to more complex states of matter, especially liquid crystals, and polymers” (official motivation of the Prize), recognising soft matter as a peculiar form of matter in the condensed phase. These pioneering frontiers in the newly established soft matter field can be considered Ferroni’s last message in the bottle to young researchers facing the twenty-first century. The eclecticism of this chemist emerged from two other compelling aspects that are illustrated in this article: the chemistry for cultural heritage that Ferroni conceived, pushed by the dramatic damages suffered by the works of art after the Florence flood in 1966, and his strong vision about the equal dignity of basic and applied research, that led him to establish fruitful relationships with industries aimed to enhance technological fallouts, as the research by the Nobel laureates in chemistry (1963) Giulio Natta and Karl Ziegler had clearly shown.
  PubDate: 2023-05-03
  DOI: 10.36253/Substantia-2055
  Issue No: Vol. 7, No. 2 (2023)
Dalton’s Long Journey from Meteorology to the Chemical Atomic Theory
- Authors: Pier Remigio Salvi
  Pages: 101 - 119
  Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to review Dalton’s contributions to science in various fields of research in relation to the first intimation of the chemical atomic theory. Early “germs” of his physical ideas may be found in the initial meteorological studies where water vapour is viewed as an “elastic fluid sui generis” diffused in the atmosphere and not as a species chemically combined with the other atmospheric gases. The next object of Dalton’s attention was atmosphere itself. He discarded affinity between atmospheric gases as a possible cause of homogeneity and, making recourse to Newtonian Principles, considered the repulsive forces among particles. Experiments on the “nitrous air test” and on the diffusion and solubility of gases were instrumental to arrive at the chemical atomic theory. The slow, laborious, and persevering work of Dalton to get the first table of atomic weights is a fascinating piece of science which may be fully appreciated by referring to his laboratory notebooks.
  PubDate: 2023-06-23
  DOI: 10.36253/Substantia-2126
  Issue No: Vol. 7, No. 2 (2023)
The Mixed Blessings of Pragmatism. Jean-Baptiste Dumas and the
(Al)chemical Quest for Metallic Transmutation
- Authors: Leonardo Anatrini
  Pages: 121 - 136
  Abstract: There were at least three prerequisites for the transmutability of metals to become once again a scientifically acceptable subject of research from the 1810s: new hypotheses concerning the mutual reducibility of certain elements, such as those of integer multiples and protyle put forward by the British chemist and physician William Prout; the experimental confirmation that chemical compounds with the same percentage composition could be substances with very different properties, i.e. the discovery of isomerism and allotropy; the comparison between metals and compound radicals of organic chemistry. This paper aims at illustrating how these premises were exploited by Jean-Baptiste Dumas, one of the leading French chemists of the 19th century, to reintroduce in the chemical discourse the alchemical topic of transmutation.
  PubDate: 2023-07-03
  DOI: 10.36253/Substantia-2169
  Issue No: Vol. 7, No. 2 (2023)
Animal Oil, Wound Balm, Prussian Blue, the Fire and Light Principium and
the Philosophers’ Stone Made from Phosphorus: on the 350th Birthday of
the Chymist Johann Conrad Dippel (1673-1734)
- Authors: Alexander Kraft
  Pages: 137 - 159
  Abstract: On the basis of many newly found archival sources and a close study of his relevant books, the life story of the chymist Johann Conrad Dippel is re-described. The preparation of his most important chymical products, i.e. animal oil, wound balm, and Prussian blue, is described. His own chymical theory was build around a fire and light principium. For decades, Dippel tried to find a process for the preparation of the philosophers’ stone. He was convinced that phosphorus was the right starting material for this. This article does not deal with his theological and philosophical views and undertakings or his medical practice, but is focused on Dippel the chymist.
  PubDate: 2023-05-30
  DOI: 10.36253/Substantia-2107
  Issue No: Vol. 7, No. 2 (2023)
Martin Heinrich Klaproth (1743-1817), a Great, Somewhat Forgotten, Chemist
- Authors: Juergen Heinrich Maar
  Pages: 161 - 178
  Abstract: For various reasons, some of them linked to the evolution of the historiography of Chemistry, many recognized and important chemists in their time – and in ours, because of the legacy they left – are relegated to some degree of oblivion. One of these chemists, dead just over 200 years ago, is Martin Heinrich Klaproth (1743-1817), a key figure in the transition from phlogiston theory to Lavoisier’s new chemistry and one of the creators of modern analytical chemistry, an empiricist who discovered many elements and polymorphism, author of remarkable chemical and mineralogical analyses and creator of archaeometry. This article presents the life, training and scientific production of a great, but less remembered, chemist, crossing the frontiers of Chemistry in many cases.
  PubDate: 2023-07-03
  DOI: 10.36253/Substantia-2125
  Issue No: Vol. 7, No. 2 (2023)
Review of Research between Science, Society and Politics: The History and
Scientific Development of Green Chemistry. Johan Alfredo Linthorst, eds.
Eburon Academic Publishers, Utrecht, The Netherlands, 2023
- Authors: Andrea Goti
  Pages: 179 - 180
  Abstract: This book is the publication of the Author's PhD thesis in History, discussed on February 2023 at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences of Maastricht University. Johan Alfredo Linthorst got a Master's degree in Chemistry at the University of Groningen in 2004 and a second Master's degree for teacher training in chemical education at Fontys University of Applied Sciences in 2005. He is involved in chemistry education at pre-university level since 2003. Parallel to his interest in teaching chemistry, including designing and publishing new experiments for students, he developed a personal interest in the history and philosophy of sciences and chemistry in particular. In this connection, in 2005 he started his research at Maastricht University as an external PhD candidate which culminated with his dissertation, which constitutes the present publication.
  PubDate: 2023-07-28
  Issue No: Vol. 7, No. 2 (2023)