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Protein, a personal history

I grew up in a family where protein was the most important nutrient. And while I want a certain historical sequence to this short essay, it seems smart to start after I turned 18 and leave discussions of my father’s heart disease and my thoughts about generational taste buds either to the ending portions of this or to another essay.

In school  a friend taught me to bake bread and make tofu. The same friend also introduced me to a series of books including, Diet for a Small Planet, The Book of Tofu, and The Book of Miso. Another friend had me read The Limits to Growth. Diet for a Small Planet by Francis Lappé was about how to sustain humans with limited resources and how it coul be done using less land, and less energy by emphasizing plant protein.  The book of Tofu and to some extent  The Book of Miso just restated the arguments in Diet for a Small Planet (DSP) to promote particular products normally made from soybeans.

Proteins are made up of Amino Acids. There are nine amino acids that people need that the human body cannot make itself. They must be consumed .  Meats are considered “complete”
proteins because meat constains all of these amino acids and that you can consider a diet with sufficient protein from meat to have sufficient supplies of each of these amino acids. Plant sources are not complete or less complete. They do not have the balance of amino acids needed. Much of DSP was involved in discussion how to mix vegetable sources to get a balanced amount of amino acids. My take away was that a small amount of beans with a large amount of traditional grains was a good easy mix that met these requirements. A generation of people were inspired by this book to get more protein from vegetable sources. Only a few of my friends became vegetarians. 

The amount of protein needed by an adult male is aobut 50 grams minimum. If you are big, you need more. If you are working hard you need more. It is not a firm line.There is also a maximum amount. If you exceed it you start to have kidney and other problems. 

If you eat a varied diet that is not based on certain protein poor sources you likely are getting enough protein.  In 1981, ten years after the books initial publication, she said,

In 1971 I stressed protein complementarity because I assumed that the only way to get enough protein … was to create a protein as usable by the body as animal protein. In combating the myth that meat is the only way to get high-quality protein, I reinforced another myth. I gave the impression that in order to get enough protein without meat, considerable care was needed in choosing foods. Actually, it is much easier than I thought.
With three important exceptions, there is little danger of protein deficiency in a plant food diet. The exceptions are diets very heavily dependent on [1] fruit or on [2] some tubers, such as sweet potatoes or cassava, or on [3] junk food (refined flours, sugars, and fat). Fortunately, relatively few people in the world try to survive on diets in which these foods are virtually the sole source of calories. In all other diets, if people are getting enough calories, they are virtually certain of getting enough protein.

By 1981 I was having blood sugar problems and my diet rich in wheat flour needed changing. Having consumed way too much sugar as a child my blood sugar was out of control and I started having large mood swings, fitful naps in the middle of the afternoon that left me feeling worse rather than better, and headaches. I started to wean myself of large amounts of grain, with the exception of oats. They seem to digest slow enough to not cause a spike in my blood sugar. I should note that almost all of my consumption was whole grain, brown rice and whole wheat flour.

The advice from my doctor was to increase my protein intake.  This worked OK but only for a week. What took long for me to understand was that what needed doing was not only reducing my high glycemic index foods (simple carbs and sugars) but increase my fiber. It is the increase in fiber that made the difference.  Ten years later I started a 15 year period where I could eat a more normal diet, that is without my allergens of milk and potatoes.

One of the more interesting things that came up was that the normal meat and grease heavy breakfast, really did not work for me. Eating Eggs, bacon, hashbrowns worked for an hour or two but by 10 am I was always hungry again. Eventually I found oatmeal. Once I started eating that breakfast was easy, cheap, and kept me feeling fed until lunch.  I started using it as a night time snack and I stopped waking up with a headache and desparately needing food.

At some point I bought a used copy of a cookbook, “The No Fad Good Food 5$ a Week Cookbook. For a 9 month school year I kept track . $3.27 a week for food. Using the cookbook’s guidance I met my adult daily requirements for everything according to the US government. I exceeded the minimum requirements for protein, and roughly got over 100grams per day. I was not thriving, but this was partly due to eating too much dairy and potatoes, things I am allergic to. The other part is that flour, whole wheat or not, has a pretty high glycemic index.  The advice “whole grains” is too general, although invariably the whole grain is better than the related refined version.  The other part is that I was using grain syrups on the bread, and eating a lot of bananas. 

My father had started his anti-vegetarian schtick which was entirely unhelpful, ” you can’t survive as a vegetarian”. I was expected to accept this verbatim because after all, he had a degree in biology and was therefore a “Scientist”.  Therefore, this harassment (3 or 4 times a year) had the tacit endorsement of my mother too. Since by this point I knew ten or twenty vegetarians that seemed to be surviving just fine, and I was not a vegetarian, by any stretch of the imagination,  it was irritating. Vengeance  did come. After his bypass and then valve replacement his cardiologist told him “it won’t likely lengthen your life, but will improve the quailty of it if you become a vegetarian”. He decided to give it a try. I started to introduce him, “This my father, he is a vegetarian”.

I was in rather desparate shape physically and monitarily and I was at a meat market for Art Professors, a conference “The College Art Association Conference” in NYC. I was asked by the interviewer, “What books have you read recently?”. 40 years ago now, I do not remember the  name of the book, but when asked what I learned from it I said, “Prior to the great potato famine in Ireland, the average Irish male ate more than 7.5 pounds of potatoes a day. Interested in survival, I looked it up,  7.5 pounds of potatoes have almost enough protein from a small male to survive. It is not particularly balanced protein, so it is not a good sole source of protein. Beans and squash seeds are good sources of these amino acids.

When I was working teaching and I had both a morning and early afternoon class I had only 40 minutes for lunch. Sanwiches did not work well. They left me hungry after only a few hours. During these semesters I was very good about bringing in food. I made up packs that could be microwaved.

To make the packs I would cook al dente about a pound of noodles. I would take two cans of rinsed beans, one can of diced tomatoes and then mix them with about 10 pounds of frozen mixed vegetables. I would mix it up, but not homogeneous, I wanted variation. Then I would add to different sections of the mixed veges, some Thai curry paste in coconut milk, some chili powder with peanut sauce, and then a section of soy sauce, hot sauce, garlic and sesame oil and pack it into bags, one bag per day. In general I would end up with 30 bags.  I would microwave them for lunch.  These meals were very low in protein, but would last through an afternoon. It was an eye opener for me. I had thought it would just get me through class. I did not need protein as much as a lot of fiber, and only a small amount of carbohydrate. The food was good. I shared packs with hungry students.

There are a bunch of protein based glues. One is casein. It is the protein from milk. The easy way to make it is to rinse cottage cheese until the curds are left without gooey stuff. Then cover them just barely with hot water and add a tablespoon of borax per 10 ounce container. In a few days you will have a gooey gluey substance that can be used as a glue or as a paint pigment binder, a medium.
Fish Glue, Hide Glue, are collagen protein glues used in furniture, and still used in musical instrument making. They are nicely reversable and stick to themselves making them valuable in repair.
Egg tempera is a paint medium using egg yolks, but the whites are also used as a binder.





Early Ceramic Innovation

By the end of my first year of ceramics classes in high school I was taken enough with the medium to want to work at home over the summer. I bought a wheel, a Pacifica Kit, and started to build a kiln in my back yard. I had no knowledge of propane, natural gas would have required copious plumbing and inspections. I built a wood fired raku kiln.
The softbrick were purchased about 7 miles from my house. I borrowed some red brick that was not in a returnable state when I was done, and found a sewer tile for the top of the chimney. Even with this I did not have enough brick for a firebox. Fortunately our soil where I lived was a pebbly glacial clay. It was full of lime, but for this purpose it did not matter. I dug a firebox. I was worried about it collapsing so I lined it with 3″ logs, and roofed the back of it near the kiln with more wood, covered on top with soil. I figured the wood would take a long time to burn and I could replace it. This worked out to be at least 4 hours of firing. My first few firings were started with small two inch cuttings picked up on the street, and finished with piano keys that I had salvaged ebony and ivory off of for my father’s harpsichords that he built as a hobby.
For a high schooler I was not poor. I had a two night a week dishwashing job at Oriental City restuarant, and I sang in a professional choir for a local synagogue. In three hours singing I earned about 1.5 times as much as an 8 hour shift washing dishes. But still I preferred spending money on other things and buying ceramics supplies was about 2 hours of driving during the week when time was often scarce.  Wanting glaze, and having already read perhaps 25 books on ceramics I decided that I could make my own with 20 Muleteam ® Borax and ground bottle glass. It worked! Later I started adding Colemanite to the mix. For raku, not kitchenware this was fine. I needed colorants. Blue bottle glass did not have enough blue in it to see over my clay, so I made some colorants. I got iron oxide by burning steel wool that I got from my father and copper oxide was gotten by heating copper wire up and then bending it to get the oxide off.  I had taken Chemistry in 10th grade. Knowledge is power!
Lots of other things happened in that kiln, most things were mundane except that the pots and surfaces added to my thoughts, and the process was educational. But at some point I began wondering how three dimensional I could get glaze to be, and then it dawned on me that I could add grog to my glaze. I gave it a go. I was not great at recording images of my work back then. I did not have my own camera, and using a roll of film for one or two objects did not make sense but I did get an image of one of these raku pieces. Its not much of an image. I never did much with these glazes but it was interesting. A
After the Wood buring Raku kiln I made other kilns, several at the summer camp I worked at. The first used charcoal and a blower. and about seven bricks. It fired one teabowl at a time. Another, a few years later visiting a friend was inside a hollow piece of tree trunk. Like the raku kiln firebox, the kiln provided some of the fuel. Years later I built a small kiln out of used phone books. Phone books were how we found phone numbers. You would get updated versions each year and in generall they covered the city you were in and nearby ones too.






The failure of common sense

Why common sense is not.

When we think of common sense we think about things that intuitively make sense. They are necessarily based on what we have seen, thought or been taught before. The effects of gravity on earth make sense. The historical context of this is interesting as a force it was discovered. Before gravity common sense said that a released ball fell because there was nothing holding it up. Gravity, at least as it is seen to affect us on the planet earth is the force the pulls the ball down. We have lived as a species with the concept for so long that it is common and makes intuitive sense.  Lots of other things make sense. That heat flows from one object to another, that when you mix two vessels of air at different temperatures you get air that is the average temperature.
But there are lots of other things in our common everyday environment that are not known via sense that is common. One I learned as a child, What are the chances that in a class of 23 students some two students will have the same birthday?  It would seem that the chance me having the same birthday as you is 1/365 so with 23 students that would be 23/365. But that is not it.
Not counting the fact that there are more people born on weekends and during some seasons of the year, when you have 23 people I could have the same birthday as 22 of them. So really the number now seems like it should be 22X23/365 . This works out to a probability of over 1, more than always true. It makes no sense. The problem is more complicated than that, and I told myself I would keep math simple, intuitive for this essay. It works out to just over a 50% probability for 23 students. There is a nice wikipedia page on this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem
Einstein’s E=MC**2 is another example. Without an understanding of speed and satelites none of our modern navigation would work.
But for me  thermodynamic problems are both simple and counterintutive. They do not make common sense, although the sense that they do make is not so hard to understand. The basic law of thermodynamics, the first law is conservation of energy. Its been around long enough that it makes common sense. You cannot create or destroy energy. This that run contrary to this or seem to run contrary do not make common sense.
A heat exchanger is something that transfers heat from one medium to another. I like to think of these and explain them as devices that exchange air in your house with outside air. I live in Texas so I think more about airconditioning than heaters and will use a cold house for an example. Lets say that you have a kitchen exhaust fan and you cool your house to 80 degrees F and outside it is 100˚F .If you just exhaust the smokey air from your kitchen the air that sneaks into the house to replace it is 100˚F and your air conditioner will cool that down.  Its not cheap if it runs often.
So, lets say you develop a device, a metal tube with fan pushing air  outside maybe 6″  in diameter and another maybe 4″  tube placed inside it arranged with a fan to push air from outside to the inside. Just for simplicity lets say that you recover half the cooling, that the air released into the house has passed half the difference to the air going outside and they are both at 90˚F. This seems like the best you can do, it makes common sense.

But if you now place another identical device feeding air outside, and inside and place it on the inside end of your first device, coming from the outside you now have air at 90˚ and on the inside air at 80˚ so this device should do a similar thing and cool the outside air that is coming to only 85˚F . If you keep adding devices, sooner or later you get air coming in at the inside temperature and leaving at the outside temperature. If you ignore condensation you can recover nearly 100% of the coolness or if you prefer the heat. 90% efficiency is not hard to achieve for heat exchangers for the home. To really understand how these work you need calculus. But they work. Common sense would limit you  to 50%,, recovering half the heat.

Air conditioners and heat pumps are even harder to make sense of with common sense. It just is not common. These do not create heat or cool, they just move it from one place to another.

If we just used some common sense, almost no modern technology would work. If we went back to before people figured out the world was a globe we would not be able to go from Europe to Japan via New York without going back over Europe. Common sense evades sense.





Souper 5$ a Week

I showed up in Kansas City MO for a year of school but in early July. I had $50 in my pocket but found a place where I could pay 1/2 month for a room in a shared house, “The Cowboy Hotel” is what we called it. My room was an uninsulated attic. I had about $15 left. I went to the food co-op and bought a bag of lentils that had red beans accidentally mixed in. It was a good price. I started sprouting the lentils.
I went down to The Plaza and got a job washing dishes. The owner yelled at the staff through a microphone. To say it was not polite was really an understatement. I felt bad for the nice people that worked there, but decided I would rather not go to school than be abused all day. I quit. I did demand my 2 hours of pay. I was direct and forceful about it being abusive.
I walked up the hill towards Rockport and arrived at a place called The Super. I applied for a dishwashing job. The application had all sorts of information that was unneeded for a dishwasher including college degrees, foreign languages, etc. I filled in the foreign languages: Fortran, Assembly language (this was a stretch), PLC, Treble, Bass and Tenor Clefs.
The manager came out and said, “Its boring around here. Can you come here on Sunday?” I washed dishes for about 3 months. After the first week I stopped eating lentils with lentil sprouts every day. I also became a prep cook. All the veges in soups were cut fresh. I was required to sharpen my knife to the point of being able to shave every day. Half way through I had to recheck it. I worked there for two years.
We did use a slicer attachment on a Hobart for somethings, but other veges had specific shapes and sizes. Becoming efficient was a challenge. The other prep cook was probaby 20% faster than I was.

The garden and tomatos


It is common to value things with money. This car cost so many dollars. But as someone with a job it is often better to think of things as hours worked. Say you can get buy on a $24 dollar an hour job and that you clear $20. But you see a shiny new Iphone that you want and it will cost your $100 plus $40 more monthly. That would be 5 hours of work now and then another two each month over and above what you are already working.  In a year that is 29 hours extra you have to work to have the phone. It about 3/4 of a weeks work or two weekend’s work.

There was a Co-Evolution Quarterly article on this ages ago. I did  not read it. I heard about it from a friend. It talked about the cost in hours of driving a car for errands vs the cost in hours of using a bicycle. Another similar one compared hourly costs of a new car vs a beater car including time taking it too and from repair shops. It is a useful way to look at things. Often saving money is easier than earning it. Sometimes it is not.

Anyhow, in order to stay in school and succeed I needed to not spend much money. I did spend a few dollars on a book, “The No-Fad, Good Food 5$ a Week Cookbook”Caroline ACKERMAN 1974 .  The book was written by a mother who was worried about her children. She had gone on a hiking trip with them and their friends. My memory is that it was about 4 days. They hiked in for a day and dinner came. She ate it but thought, “no meat”. Well she figured there would be some the next day. There was none at lunch. At dinner when there was none she spoke up, “Where is the meat?”. The kids said, “No meat mom, we are hiking” . She said, ” We’d better go back, we are going to starve! ” They responded , “Mom, its two days back or two days to finish, we are not going to starve.”

Her children were about to go off to school and she was worried about them. She read, and although from Canada decided that they should know how to meet their minimun US Daily Adult Requirements for food.

I used the book as a guide and for a school year I kept track of expenses and spent $3.27 per week on average. During this time I was working at The Souper and  ate a meal there and brought home about a pound of bread ends.  The diet was mostly rice, beans and inexpensive vegetables including potatoes, onions, and cabbage. But I also purchase winter squash and pumpkin when it was cheap. A 10 pound pumpkin can be had very inexpensively the day after Halloween. I bought 6 eggs every week. I made yogurt from non-instant dry powdered milk which was inexpensive because of subsidies. I sometimes turned it into Labney, or yogurt cheese. The whey went into my bread that I baked.

I made tofu a few times. I bought almost no “prepared” food although I was using some margarine to save money. I did splurge on a stick of butter every few weeks. 

This is about the time my father started in on me, “You can’t survive as a vegetarian”. I do not think a year went by when he harassed me with this. I was never a vegetarian. I even at some turkey bought when really cheap and occasionally chuck steaks. But chicken showed up frequently. He seemed to start up when he was meeting my friends. It was annoying. He knew it.

About the time of his coronary bypass operation about a decade after his heart attacks his doctor told him, “You know, if you became a vegetarian you likely would not live much longer, but you would have a better time doing it.” I started introducing him. “This is my father, Joe. He is a vegetarian.”

Freshmand from the dorms on Sundays.



Just sitting

By the time fourth or fifth grade hit I had some idea about statistics. I used to answer a friend’s questions, “Do you think you will take a trip in June?” with responses like. “80% yes.” I was a Determinist. Determinism is the belief that all events are caused by prior events including those classified as “free will”. We got the way we are by previous events and out experience and physicality determines how we will act. I am still one, but it has become less important in my life.
One of the more pressing mental issues in my life is some good dose of some form of ADHD. Likely I will need to bring this up later, separately, but it does have an impact on motivation. Even by fourth or fifth grade consciousness of these issues was at least in part there. I had a hard time getting going on things, even fun things.  Being a determinist I thought maybe I was preordained to have no motivation. There seemed no reason to do anything. I decided that I better test it. I sat down. I did nothing. I really cannot say how long this lasted. Buddhist say that the Buddha meditated for 49 days. I likely did not last 49 minutes. I did last more than 49 seconds.
In sitting contemplating not having any motivation I came to some conclusions.
1. I was bored just sitting.
2. Sitting was not being fun.
3. Maybe I was preordained to have motivation to do something.
4. Maybe my current state wanted fun.
I was not preordained to have motivation to only sit.
It did not take long but I decided that true or not, determinism was not very much fun. I did find that the attitude was not easy to explain to others my age. I got up. 

I have heard many arguments against determinism. None really hold water for me. Simply stated most of these arguments are that because you cannot observe a state without changing it you cannot know what the condition is  that will bring about the next position. Just because you cannot know it, does not mean it does not exist. Because you cannot determine what will be does not necessarily mean that it is not predetermined by the previous state.

Perhaps it will come up again, but these thoughts led me to think about models and scientific theories,,, how they are approximations always. I have generalized this with the following statement.
“The only adequate model for how anything works is the entire totality.”


 

Clean Kitchenaide ®

I am failing at finding a way to tie this essay together so will just get writing.
Clean.

I grew up in a home with kosher food. My mother had promised her mother that she would keep a kosher home. I suspect that my grandmother was a believer, but never met her. She was deceased before I was born. 
There are a couple of proscriptions that became very important in some ways in my life. The first is not eating milk and meat, and pigs not being kosher food. The issue of pigs, pig fat, sea food, will have to be dealt with in another essay. The need in a kosher home for four sets of dishes is another. The laws of kashrut, keeping kosher, are a boon for ceramic producers. This too is a separate issue and deserving of its own essay. But today getting ready for the beginning of Passover is the topic, or at least the start of it.

Passover is the holiday commemorating the Exodus from Egypt. There are a lot of parts to this, many separate aspects, but I want to focus on cleaning up of leaven, grains that can be fermented into bread or alcohol, and its impact on my life. So first you have to understand this.

Before the start of Passover, at least in the tradition that was my house, and most Jewish cultures, you have to get rid of all of your grain, and things made of it. This seems pretty simple. But like many things in Orthodox and Conservative Judaism, trying to keep the letter of the law, and trying to make sure of it, gets complicated.

Left over products in the refrigerator and cabinets, rice, flour, starch, sugar, almost everything, was given to someone who was not Jewish. This could include the woman who cleaned once a week, the mailman,  and others. If it could not be given away it was thrown away. The only exception to this as I remember it was unopened cans and hard liquor. The cans and booze went into our cold cellar in the basement, really a long term pantry, it was not that cold.

The kitchen was cleaned. One year the glasses of mine that were lost were found behind the fridge as it was pulled from the wall. The coils on the back were cleaned and the floor underneath it scrubbed. As I remember it, the coils were my brother’s job. I cleaned the blender.

At some point we got an Osterizer® blender with ten speeds controlled by buttons. It was going to be used over Passover, so it had to be cleaned. The buttons got really grimy over the year so it had to be disassembled. This was my job. I remember it being difficult the first time. When finished there was no visible gunge anywhere.  We used this blender over Passover. Somehow this sort of cleaning was not acceptable for other kitchen appliances except the stove, fridge, dishwasher and sink.

In high school one of my jobs was to wash dishes for a Chinese Restaurant. Work started at 4pm by cleaning the dirty dishes from lunch, running them through the dishwasher and getting ready for the evening rush. Each evening at about 8 there was an additional cleaning task, although a few times I got to help mass producing egg rolls.

Chinese restaurants were a target for food safety inspectors. Consequently where I worked was one of the cleanest restaurants I have every worked in. It seemed like we got inspected every two weeks, fined threatened with closure, harassed. One time I remember the inspector decided he was going to target the stock pot. The stock pot held about 12 gallons of broth. It was left running 24 hours a day. Good stock was used in any dish that needed cooking liquid and in all the soups. He said something about food poisoning. I got a little argumentative even though I should have held my breath. I was just the dishwasher. But it worked he left us alone. I was left with the impression that my white skin was bigger influence than what I said.

On weekends we cleaned. Often the cooks helped. The cooler was emptied and cleaned. The floor and walls were left immaculate. The corners had to always be scrubbed. The smell of bleach could be overwhelming. On Sunday afternoon we cleaned the grease traps or filters over one set of woks and then the other. This was hard work. I wish that I knew then what I know now about removing grease.

When I got to The Kansas City Art Institute I eventually got a job in the school cafeteria. Although it did not pay as well as my previous job, the shorter travel time made it a better deal. At first I was the weekend cleaner. The first week or two I was given directions and a special job. By week three I was left alone. “Are you doing the coolers and  grease traps every week?” “Yes”.

I worked hard for Marion League. Once I knew what her life was like I worked harder. She was the foster mother for a group of disabled children and had a hard time making ends meet. At school no one starved. She would feed students if they were hungry even if they were broke. I do not know the limits of this, but one friend got fed for a few days every month. I do not know if they paid her back.

After about a year I was asked if I wanted to be the Saturday short order cook. I said OK.  This was sandwiches, eggs, hash browns, biscuits and gravy, bacon and sausage. Also coffee. Marion said that we had to turn $120 to break even. I made it my business to do what I could. I cleaned the coffee urn when I got there in the morning, especially the filter holder. I increased the strength of the coffee and let people know. I cut lunch meats and but the “sawdust” from this process to sprinkle on the gravy. I also put paprika on top. Bacon grease was used in the gravy. To me this was still pretty yucky but I knew others would like it. Not growing up with much bacon in my life it was not an easy flavor. I would rather just eat the biscuits.

I was given a couple of options for biscuits. There was mix or I could make it from scratch. I aways made it from scratch. They got better as I worked there longer but not much better. But along with the gravy the biscuit sales went up. We started to make a second urn of coffee just before lunch. The last innovation was “garbage omletes”. I did not yet know the value of a good name. Anyhow, just before closing you could order a 2 or 3 egg omelette and I would stuff it with what ever there was that I was going to have to dispose of after the shift. We closed at 3 and stayed closed on Sunday. Leftovers were disposed of. Most vegetables were disposed of and replaced early Monday morning. There was a lot of food to put in these. If there was not any, I used cabbage and onions. I also made the hash browns from scratch. They are best if left on the griddle for a long time.

After a few months, Marion pulled me aside, “I know that you cannot be stealing from me, where is all the money coming from?” I asked if she looked at the register tape. She said that it made no sense.  How do you sell 25 omelettes in the last 15 minutes of business? Even the coffee sales are better than some weekdays.  I explained it to her. 

The food there was wholesome for the most part.  The year after I graduated they replaced her with a food service.

So, why this essay? Just the thoughts running through my head as I clean the Kitchenaide® mixer, full of bread residue, as I get prepped to regrease it. I am thoroughly impressed with the beefy engineering of this 4.5 quart mixer. Serviced every couple of decades it could last forever. Now, even the slots in the heads of the screws have been cleaned.




 

 

 

Kitchenaid ® is a registered trademark of Kitchenaid I guess.

titles, limits, outlines, categories

  • The function of this post is to create titles for a collection of essays, or perhaps a cohesive storyline within which to constrain writing.
  • General Categories
  • Technical about Clay
  • Technical but more general
  • Aesthetics and Quality
  • Idea generation, innovation
  • my work
  • Thailand Culture
  • Thailand Clay
  • People I know
  • Food?
  • Philosphy, predetermination, uncertainty, humility,
  • Lessons from Thai Buddhism, Japan,
  • Environment พอเพียง Sufficiency Economy
  • Thai Politics
  • ADHD, dysgraphia
  • the problems of uniform expectations, education, pro diversity.

 

Burners, Atmospheric, Considerations, Addendum on Wood

Kiln Burner Painting

Venturi Burner by Louis Katz , all-weather paint stick on plywood, torched.

Nothing in this post should be considered safety information. A lot of it is just what I think, not having read it anywhere in a format I could really understand. Other information I am consolidating.

Atmospheric burners are not understood particularly well by ceramic artists. I am going to try and clarify some things about them. I have not found any wonderful texts about them, most of what I know has been gleaned from catalogs that used to provide much more information than can be found now. While this is almost exclusively Eclipse® and Pyronics® catalogs others have entered into the mix.  To simplify things I am only going to consider Natural gas, an impure methane that is generally delivered through pipes to homes and businesses. I live in the US. So its possible that something I say will only be applicable here,,, but I can’t think what that would be.

Entrained Air
An atmospheric burner with a venturi tube is a device whose function is to efficiently use the kinetic energy of gas coming out of an orifice to carry air with it. The air that it carries through the burner is called “entrained air” also “primary air”. 

Orifice
The orifice that the gas flows out of is called the orifice, sort of a truism. The size of the orifice and the pressure the gas is under determines how many BTUs, calories, or cubic feet of gas are flowing into the burner. Orifices that are properly made and drilled create less turbulence when the gas exits the orifice and prevents loss of kinetic energy. This consequently increases the amount of air that will or can be entrained. We will discuss this further below in several places.

Primary Air
Primary air is the air entrained in the burner. The air coming into the kiln around the end of the burner is secondary air.  I guess much of this is redundant. It seemed needed. 

Flame Retention Ring
These are devices on the kiln end of the venturi tube whose job is to efficiently mix the gas and air, create a faster area for the mixed gas and air to flow through, and often provide a small amount of slower gas around the circumference to act as a pilot for the flame so that it will always light near the Retention Ring.  The faster speed is so that the mixed gas and air is moving out quicker than it is burning back into the burner. If the speed in the retention ring is too slow then you get back burning, burning inside the venturi tube. This creates soot and other troubles.

Methane – CH4

How Atmospheric burners, a mixer head where the orifice and air come, a venturi or straight tube, and flame retention ring, are sized.

The exact amount of oxygen (from air) needed to burn a molecule of methane, CH4, into carbon dioxide and water is CH4 +2O2 = CO2 + 2H20,, two molecules of O2. How much is this by volume or weight is not really important. But this ratio, we will call Neutral Combustion.

If it were only the gas we were concerned with then burners would be sized by the size of the gas orifice. You would not use a burner, and just pump gas into the kiln. All the air would be brought in with the chimney and the kiln would need to be kept at a higher negative pressure to do this. But there are two problems with this. One is that any leaks in the kiln will bring larger amounts of air in, and if they are not near the gas source then they will cool those areas, and keep them oxidizing more than anyone would need them to be. The second problem is that you need mixing of gas and air.  Gas heated in the absence of enough oxygen will produce soot, pure or nearly pure carbon. [This is hard on people contributing to heart disease, lung disease and cancer along with particulate pollution and other environmental effects.] Soot can be very slow to burn. There may be times when you want soot such as carbon trapping glazes but for the most part it is usually just wasted fuel. Assuming that the mixing of gas and air before heating is good, then this happens when the oxygen is less than 1/2 of the amount needed. CH4+O2 = C +2 H2O. In general this is a good way to waste fuel. In small gas kilns some of this burns in the chimney, but some does not. Unfortunately Carbon does not reduce carbon dioxide to monoxide, at least not easily as far as I know. I suspect that if you heat carbon and carbon dioxide hot enough you will get carbon monoxide forming,,, but I do not know enough to be sure of this. Perhaps a chemist will chime in.

[I recently found a copy of a a catalog for the  now unavailable single state Low Pressure Injectors from Eclipse. It gives numbers for 30-50% entrainment. This does not fit my memory or understanding.  Eclipse Atmospheric Injectors, Bulletin 650, 1/8/2015]

The charts that I have seen for burners being sold generally state an assumed amount of entrained air. For example; These numbers may assume that some percentage of the air needed for neutral combustion will be entrained by the burner. That is, a little over 1/2 the air needed to completely burn the gas will be entrained by the burner (or mixed in at the burner tip as secondary air). You will get some CO2 from this air, but most of the carbon will leave as CO which will still burn if more air, more O2, is provided. You only need or want a little CO for reduction. Too much and your kiln will not climb in temp and you will waste time, fuel, money. Too little will be talked about under mixing a few paragraphs down. 

The rest of the air needed is supplied by secondary air coming in around the flame retention ring. The O2 in this air burns the CO into CO2.

Why do you get more BTUs with higher pressures?


Lets just say you have a cubic meter, or cubic yard if you insist, of gas. I find it easier to image this with more gas especially when it is at a very low pressure, say 1cm water column, or 1 inch water column if you prefer. The gas, coming out of the orifice will come out slowly and will have little kinetic energy in the stream. In fact it will only have the kinetic energy used to compress it. If you use way more energy to compress the gas you will also need a smaller orifice if the gas is going to come out at the same rate. But having put more energy in you get more energy out. This energy, in part transfers to the air coming into the burner, in fact this energy is what draws air into the burner. I find it easier to visualize with the idea that the gas coming out the orifice blows air out of the burner, the air then needs to be replaced so more is drawn in. High pressure, small orifice, entrains more air because there is more “blow”, more kinetic energy, in the gas. More air means that keeping to 65% of what you need for full combustion, means you can use more gas. More gas means even more kinetic energy. Higher pressures increase the capacity of the burner. However they also increase turbulence. At some point the amount entrained in the burner no longer increases much as the pressure increases. When you get to the point where the air that can be entrained drops below 65% of that needed you have reached the maximum practical pressure of the burner.  Eclipse and Pyronics used to release good charts on their burners that mostly made this clear if you studied the numbers. 

Negative pressure at the burner port.

If  kiln is hot and the damper open you can get a slight decrease in pressure at the burner port. Assuming that the burner is placed properly in relation to the port, this decrease in pressure will allow more air to be pushed (or pulled if you like) through the burner,,, . I think of this lower pressure as sucking air through the burner. [The sucking or pulling is an easier model but is not technically correct.]  Lets assume that you make those ports too big. In order to get a given volume through them you need only a little pressure difference. As they get smaller, the pressure in the ports is going to fall. This increases the capacity of the burners because it decreases the pressure at the burner head. There needs to be enough space around them for the requisite secondary air. [100%-65%=35%]. But often these ports are made too large if the goal is maximizing the capacity of the burners so that you can heat faster.

Further the flame retention ring acts in respect to the burner port similar to the gas in the burner and carries secondary air into the kiln using its kinetic energy.

Mixing

In order for the gas to burn it has to be in contact with the oxygen in the air. If it gets hot without the air it won’t burn. If it gets hot with only a little air you will get soot. The most important mixing happens before it burns, in the flame retention ring. Burners made without them have the potential to waste a lot of fuel as soot . CH4+O2 = C +2 H2O. Interestingly higher gas pressure should produce more turbulence in a given amount of time but the gases also move through the burner body quicker. I think that you end up with better mixing, but I am not sure.  It does appear that you get better mixing with the secondary air.

About 68 percent of the heat in methane is released burning it to carbon monoxide. Knowing this makes it clear why firing closer to neutral is quicker. I like to think if firing with too little air, firing in too much reduction, as being like paddling upstream with a small paddle.

Bad mixing, too little primary air, soot, once the kiln is quite hot,  can make determining if you are reducing difficult. The soot can be burning off in the flue making flame and looking like reduction. The same can happen out spyholes. You can close down one burner’s primary air and get soot, have the kiln oxidize and have flame at the spy holes (bungs) and at the flue.

While we are on it, the flame does not come out of the kiln unless there is oxygen that is not yet combined coming out as well. The flames we normally see from uncombusted gases coming out from the kiln are hollow and start where they come in contact with fresh air. Paying attention to this, especially in wood or oil kilns can save a lot of heartache and trouble.

Heat is released when all the necessities for combustion are met, heat, O2, fuel and mixing. Well I suppose they are not in the same place unless they are mixed, but that is a fine point. The sooner good mixing takes place the sooner the heat is released. Since primary air mixes at the burner, secondary air released later in the kiln chamber. Up to a point this can be used to control temp in different parts of the kiln. 

Mixing is always imperfect. As you approach neutral combustion you should assume that some parts of the kiln are in oxidation, some reduction, as well as some parts effectively neutral. Likely with methane there is always some water gas reaction. Who knows how long hydrogen can survive in a mixed atmosphere.  There is too much I don’t know.

Wood Combustion

Part of this dynamic and discussion seems very important in wood kilns, particularly long ones. “This is what I see happening.”” This seems in part more like conjecture.” I am going to encode sentences with how certain I am of them. Sentences with fairly high certainties will have one period. Sentences where I am pretty sure two periods.. Less certain, three periods… just a working theory, four…. These are of course approximate. Some things might be substantiated by reading, some by experience, some just because they make sense.

Pyrolysis of wood produces many products. At higher temperatures these include H2 (hydrogen molecules), CH4 (Methane), CO (Carbon Monoxide) , and CO2(Carbon Dioxide) and H2O (water). Charcoal becomes mostly just carbon and ash as pyrolysis progresses. As it becomes more pure it burns more and more only on the surface. 
Before coming into contact with added air, some of the methane and water is going to go through the water gas reaction, CO+ H2O = CO2 + H2  .. This does not really change what is in the mix, just the proportions of it.

So, for me the easiest to start with is the Hydrogen. It is the easiest to burn.. It has the lowest flash point and the highest affinity for oxygen of all the common products of pyrolysis.. It burns first.. Like carbon monoxide its affinity for oxygen makes it an agent for reduction. But these two ingredients appear to have different properties of reduction of glazes.. This  appears to create some of the vagaries of wood fire.

Because of hydrogen’s high affinity for oxygen and its tendancy to burn quicker and easier it is the first to leave the stream. Because of this, it often is not likely to affect the clay. It disappears too quickly by becoming water. But one of its properties differentiates it from carbon monoxide. It is more soluble in glass than carbon monoxide.. Where carbon monoxide either needs to reduce a glaze only on the surface or only before it is melted, hydrogen can effectively penetrate the surface of the glass and reduce materials after they have melted.. This appears to be the mechanism that creates the salmon colored flashing often sought in wood and soda firing.. How this relates to other mysticism relating to the miraculous Avery Kaolin I don’t know. I am certain that Alan Watts must have done a lecture on Avery…

That salmon color seems to require a small amount of volitalized alkali metal. You can get it with both potassium carbonate and sodium carbonate is vapor kilns. It is not strictly a soda color. But introduction of water into a reducing stream of gas appears to increase the amount of salmon color.. I first heard of this from Mac McClanahan in the early 1980’s and then I tested it. It seemed true. Further use of it in my work, and my students has made me more certain..  The year after testing it I was a resident at The Archie Bray and read about the water gas reaction being used to reduce iron oxide in brick and lowering the maturing temperature of pavering block in Archie’s old library. I became a believer.

The next fuel in the mix is CH4. Given enough oxygen this just burns to water and carbon dioxide, just like it would coming from a pipe.  The Hydrogen generally goes to water first but given some existing water some of it becomes hydrogen. This is the part of this that makes me squirm and wonder if the model is correct. Some of it if mixed with air poorly or if the oxygen mix is too low becomes soot and water.  This is part of the reason that firebox design  in wood kilns seems critical. Methane burning with suffient oxygen has a blue color.

Carbon monoxide, just as in gas kilns appears to be the main reduction agent lingering in part, if you are firing in reduction, until it comes out from the kiln. The yellow orange flame at the flue or spy holes, if not the result of sodium flare, appears to be the carbon monoxide burning. Oxy -Hydrogen flames have a similar color but are much weaker in light. This can keep things confused I think. I believe that this color is more towards red, but also has a small component of blue…

It can be really difficult to determine the source of a flame color. It is important in learning to do this to evaluate the hue as this changes by source. There are several different fuels with yellow orange flames.

In a kiln, you only see flame where there is enough combustion to create enough light. I suspect that the water-gas reaction also produces light…

This brings us to carbon, soot, C, is of all of these fuels the hardest to burn. The first part of this is that it just needs a higher temperature to combust. I believe that Cardew states that this is 650˚C and I have seen other reference to 660˚C..  Cold air can extinguish burning carbon.. It also produces less heat per gram. The third is that it tends to clump when it is produced and can only mix with air on its outside layer. It has the ability to lengthen flames if the kiln has sufficient oxygen. Carbon may have an important role in evening the temperature in long single chamber kilns….But soot leaving the kiln is wasted fuel.

I wonder if having multiple stoke ports along with its obvious use in evening temperature also contributes to a bigger distribution of salmon color as it puts the hydrogen closer to more of the ware….

Burning charcoal that has lost its volatiles requires hot air. Since it only burns on the surface it goes away slowly. Maintaining the heat is critical to burn charcoal and this is one of the important aspects of Bourry box kilns. The do this by putting the location to burn charcoal after the production of methane and hydrogen and after where these gases start to burn.






Archie Bray Foundation Front showing bottles by Louis and stack of Gail's

Archie Bray Foundation Front showing Louis’ soda fired bottles and stack of Gail Busch’s in the window. Brick were fired in the brickyard.

 

Mistakes and Innovation

Innovation is often brought about by pressure. You can do something a certain way and it is expensive, so cost pressures you to find a cheaper way. The expense can be time, material, monetary currency, complexity, reliability, lack of beauty. The expense does not even have to be real to pressure you towards innovation. It just has to be perceived.

Early on in my development of my current light installation I had to have a way to turn up and down the levels of light on Red Green and Blue LEDs. The light levels built into my RGB chip that I am using are 0-255 . There are only 256 levels. The problems are that there is nearly no difference between 254 and 255, the lowest levels are not visible, 0,1,2, and sometimes 3, cannot be seen, and the difference between 3,4,and 5 are pretty coarse and that the three colors have different properties. Some seem more linear at lower levels than others. The lowest visible level on each of them is different. Each time you want to adjust one of the levels you change the code and then load it up to the chip. Getting it to look smooth was not difficult, but at the start it was time consuming.

When using a bigger chip with more memory I used three lookup tables for the levels. This is a table that might start like this, [0,2,3,4,6,8,10,13,16, etc.] But for this piece I only had ATTiny 85 chips during the development. Others were becoming available again. The ATTiny has got “Tiny” in its name for a reason. At $1.59 its memory is limited.

Using the lookup tables I started to get “out of memory” type errors when trying to “compile” the program. Compiling is the process where what you have written gets translated into the code your computer, in this case the ATTiny can use. I had to come up with another way. The errors made no sense to me, my program did not use that much memory. But I am not a computer scientist, no degree, no deep expertise. “Live with it, find a new way”.

So, instead of using a lookup table I used multiplication and division of integers. But because numbers with decimal points use more storage, I would multiply by 106 and then divide by 100 then add 1 on the way up . So 30 stepped would step to the integer portion of 30*106/100 +1, or 32. 100 steps to 107 and as you get higher the steps get bigger. Coming down I multiply by a number less than a 100, say 94 and subtract the 1. This does not use that much less memory as far as I could figure, but it worked. Maybe there was something I did not know. I cannot know everything, sometimes I just let things be if they are working.

Well turns out I had tried to compile my software with the settings set for an ATTiny 25, not an ATTiny 85 and it has much less memory. However, the new method is much easier to tweak and keep track up so I have stuck with it. It produces numbers very similar to my lookup tables, mostly because my lookup tables were done by mostly approximating the formula in my head. The formula has a softer top or bright range and I like the way it looks. I ran a single strip of lights back and forth the old lookup table way and the new way. I like the new way. If I go back to a lookup table for some reason I will likely calculate the steps.

The chips I am talking about using in the next piece have four times as many steps. I am about to start working with them. But I think that the properties of LEDs will stay the same so the formulas will stay similar. Since the communication time with the new LEDs is also faster there should be less jitter and flicker. I am excited to see them. With more steps lookup tables become even less efficient and more difficult. The multiplication and division for indexing is much easier.