Profile

Hi, I’m Jo and I am a chemical engineer who lives in Surrey.

My passion outside of work is sport. I play hockey 3 times a week, go running twice a week, and throw in a few yoga and gym sessions in the week too. In the summer I also play a lot of golf.

After growing up surrounded by fields in Suffolk, I went up north to Newcastle University to study chemical engineering. I loved it, so when I graduated (and after going travelling for 4 months) I started working as a chemical engineer for Air Products, who I still work for now.

OK that’s a bit of a lie, I don’t exactly sell air. Air is a mixture and the job of my company is to separate it into its different parts (mainly oxygen and nitrogen) and sell those. Liquid nitrogen can be used for freezing food because it’s really cold (I mean REALLY cold), and oxygen gas can be used in hospitals or as rocket fuel.

There are different ways to separate and sell the air:

• Different methods will give products with different purities and pressures.
• We can store it as a gas or a liquid for a customer.
• We can build a chemical plant at their site and install a pipeline to send the product to them, or we can fill up a storage tank for them, or we can sell them cylinders/canisters of gas – it all depends how much they want and how often they want it.

How do I fit in to this?

When a company wants to buy some oxygen or nitrogen from us, I have to work out the best way to sell it to them to meet their needs. This involves asking questions about the customer to find out exactly what they want, and then asking questions to lots of different engineers to make sure we can give the customer what they need, at the right cost and in time to meet the deadline. Armed with all this information I develop a proposal to submit to them.

An example of an Air Products site

Refilling a storage tank for a customer

Cylinders on their way to a customer

Here is an example of a typical day for me:

8:30 – 9:00 Get coffee then check through emails that have come in overnight from America

9:00 – 10:30 Meeting to review a Process Flow Diagram (PFD) for my latest proposal (this is essentially the map of how the air separation plant will be put together. It shows all the major equipment, instrumentation and piping). There are 6 of us in the meeting from different disciplines and we run through each page to check we’ve included all the necessary equipment and instrumentation, we discuss any potential safety concerns, and talk about the feasibility of the changes.

10:30 – 11:00 Some questions were raised in the PFD review meeting that I have to action so I pop upstairs to speak to an Electrical engineer about the size of the electrical building, and another engineer sees me and asks me questions about another proposal I’m working on.

11:00 – 11:30 I’m holding a meeting this afternoon so I make some final updates to my slides and send them out to all meeting attendees

11:30 – 12:00 I call a plant manager in Israel because I have remembered I need something from him by the end of the week – they are 2 hours ahead of UK and it’s a Thursday (in Israel their weekend is Friday and Saturday) so I’m running out of time to ask him. Luckily I get hold of him and he sends me the drawings I need while we’re on the phone.

12:00 – 1:30 Sprint sessions at the park with my work running club, followed by lunch at my desk catching up with the news.

1:30-2:30 General emails and grab a coffee

2:30-3:30 Commercial Kick-off meeting for one of my proposals that we’ve just won. This is where the Business teams and the Engineering teams come together to discuss how we will run the project to make it successful.

3:30-4:30 Proposal Approval meeting (this is the meeting I am hosting). It’s to get approval for a proposal I am about to submit so there are lots of managers there to present to. It’s taken some time to prepare for this meeting to make sure I’ve anticipated a lot of the questions I am going to be asked. Luckily this one goes to plan!

4:30 – 5:30 Make a few changes to the slide pack from the Proposal Approval meeting then send it out to the management team for written approval.

5:30 – 6:30 Reply to some of the emails that have come in while I’ve been in my other meetings and fire an email over to the US (so they can reply overnight) about some upcoming travel plans.

My company runs liquid nitrogen demonstrations. This involves us going into schools and explaining the properties and uses of nitrogen in a really fun way. Without giving away all the fun it basically involves things like hammering a blue tac nail into a bit of wood with a banana, making lots of things go bang, shattering a bunch of flowers into tiny pieces like shards of glass, and making the bubble monster. With the prize money we’d be able to invest in more equipment to make our experiments bigger and better, and hopefully be able to reach out to even more of you so you can see the fun for yourselves!