Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Difficulties in academic writing

In our college study, we have to write a lot of academci essays. Academic essay is quite different from general papers. When we write an academic essay, we have to pay attention to many aspects, such as the format, organization, language, and content. For me, the most challenging part of writing an academic essay is language and content.
I take the module SSA2204, which requires us to have a good skill of writing academic essay. however, for me, i have lots of problems. Content is the most big problem. When i read the singaporean students' essays, i find their content is very meaningful and closely related to the topic, however, my essay lacks of such meaningful content, which cannot prove my opinion very well. hence i plan to read more local studnts' artilces to improve my lackage of content, and in daily life i had better to read more newspapers and academic journey to enrich my brian. Another problem for me is language, my tutor told me she know what i want to express, but the language is not so good, for example, my language either has some grammar errors or is very simple. I always feel very worried about my language because i find i hardly have some improvements on my language since my briding course. My previous tutor told me one way to improve my language is to memorise a lot of vocabularies, hence you can choose a better world to put in your sentence to make the sentence more meaingful. For the grammar errors, sometimes i find it's a little different between China and Singapore, for example, in my briding course i wrote a sentence " the more you eat, the heavier you are", my tutor told me this sentence is wrong, but my chinese-english teacher taught us like that. so i think i should read more or recite more sentences to modify my errors.

Monday, October 6, 2008

The growth in emission of carbon dioxide

Why is carbon dioxide (CO2) a problem?
Today molecules of carbon dioxide have increased 100 molecules per million to 380 molecules per million since pre-industrial times. The rising of carbon dioxide molecules leads to boosting global temperature, which will result in rising sea levels and other natural disasters. However, it’s hard to decrease the carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Since most of the energy come from burning fossil fuel, which produce huge quantity of carbon dioxide, so a challenging problem for the engineers is to develop a system to capture and store the carbon dioxide.
How do you capture CO2?
A chemical system is used to capture carbon dioxide. Smokestacks of coal-burning electric power plants could be replaced with absorption towers. One tower would contain chemicals that isolate carbon dioxide from the other gases (nitrogen and water vapor). A second tower would separate the carbon dioxide from the absorbing chemicals.
There are two main ways to alter the combustion process at the outset; one way is burning coal in pure oxygen rather than ordinary air. That would make separating the carbon dioxide from the exhaust much easier.
Another way is to burn coal to produce a synthetic gas, typically containing hydrogen and carbon monoxide. Adding steam to the synthetic gas converts the carbon monoxide into additional hydrogen and carbon dioxide that can be filtered out of the system.
How do you store CO2?
There are two main ways to store the carbon dioxide. The first way is storing the carbon dioxide in depleted oil fields, for example, offers an important economic advantage — the carbon dioxide interacts with the remaining oil to make it easier to remove. And carbon dioxide’s presence reduces the friction impeding the flow of oil through the rock to wells.
Concerns about leaks suggest to some experts that the best strategy might be literally deep-sixing carbon dioxide, by injecting it into sediments beneath the ocean floor. High pressure from above would keep the carbon dioxide in the sediments and out of the ocean itself. It might cost more to implement than other methods, but it would be free from worries about leaks.


National Academy of Engineeing.(n.d.) develop carbon sequestration methods. Retrieved 3th oct,2008 from http://www.engineeringchallenges.org/cms/8996/9077.aspx