“Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further developments.”
Roman engineer Julius Sextus Frontinus in 10 A.D.
Unsubmerged Info is Paratherm’s new weblog. This blog will cover mainly three subject areas: Industrial Processing, Business Technology, and The History of Engineering.
Here at Paratherm Corporation, we deliver heat transfer fluids and system cleaners, we troubleshoot existing applications and help with design and layout of new ones, we develop new fluids and system cleaning products for an ever-expanding range of industries and situations.
On these pages, we will be publishing specifically about our own activities in these areas, but we have other interests, and we believe you, our audience has many interests as well, beyond the fairly narrow limits of heat transfer fluids and the systems and applications they circulate through.
A heat transfer fluid manufacturer, like any specialty manufacturer, has a unique perspective upon the world of industry, and the world at large. While many of our customers and partner OEMs have specialties within specific industries or application types, we supply our fluids for temperature control in hundreds of applications, within dozens of industries.
Commonly referred to as The Process Industries, these include food manufacturing, bulk chemical and fine chemical production, pharmaceutical ingredient and medical finished product processing, petroleum refining, plastics material production and plastic end-product production, alternative fuels, metals, paper, and many more.
Within each of these industries, we serve many specific applications. For instance, just within the food processing realm, food-grade heat transfer fluids are employed in volume frying, grilling, baking and roasting; in drying applications such as food powders and ingredients; and in purification of edible oils, a process called deodorization.
We’ve got a bunch of engineers here, some specializing in particular industries as salespeople, others working across the industrial spectrum in our technical and training work, keeping our customers’ applications running smoothly or supporting their process managers and maintenance techs to help keep them (safely) running themselves.
So we’ve got people immersing themselves in varied industries and processes; keeping in touch with equipment and heater manufacturers; reading trade journals in various disciplines; we’ve got interns and new faces coming in fresh from universities with new degrees that haven’t uncurled yet, bringing new ideas and new perspectives. We’ll be talking to all these people and reporting what we hear in this blog.
Business Technology is another area we wish to comment upon occasionally in this blog. We will interpret this term broadly. Tools and techniques to enable business objectives? Sounds good to us.
111 years ago that infamous U.S. patent official stated that “Everything has already been invented.” [1. …then again, maybe not. Read this article: http://www.myoutbox.net/posass.htm] He should have known better; after all, exactly two millenia ago this year Julius Sextus Frontinus made a similar statement, as quoted at the top of this post, and in the intervening years the “progress is over” mistake has been repeated repeatedly.
It’s unlikely at this point that anybody will make that same mistake again, in an age when technological wonders, used in business and elsewhere, actually become obsolete at a rate unprecedented in human history. It wasn’t so long ago that electric typwriters were, if not the height of business technology, the ubiquitous face of it. We remember with a reluctant fondness that squealing trilling white-noise electronic handshake sequence our wired modems made signaling (cross your fingers!) that internet connection, and access to unlimited information at 33,000 baud, was nigh. Now we’re leveraging smart phones, RFiD, QR Codes, Mobi, GIS, location-based services—and baud rates are practically irrelevant.
And engineering itself, the focused application of principles of mechanical, electronic, and chemical discovery, the use of gained knowledge in practical pursuit of utilitarian objectives, has a rich history separate from that of pure science and the great stories of discovery whether ancient from or last January. So The History of Engineering will be our third topic of investigation in this blog. Exploration and research may unearth theoretical wonders, but it’s the engineers that make them useful.
Of course, we will be writing about ourselves, our business, our products and services, the thermal fluids and system cleaners, the systems and heaters and users, our clients and customers and OEM relationships, and how all these relate to the larger business world and technology at large.
But while we’re at it, we’ll be looking back at engineering history and how it brought us to where we are, and looking inward at the work of business and how we leverage technology to improve it.
There’s a lot to talk about. A lot to unsubmerge. Please feel free to join the conversation. <b><b><b><b>