The kind lady at the motel sorted us
right out in the morning with pancakes and fried eggs for breakfast before we
resumed our progress to Karaganda. A distant haze oozed over the long straight
roads as we traversed Lake Balkhash, making the tarmac appear like shiny
mirrors. Kazakhstan had provided us with some of the best driving conditions on
the trip so far affording us the opportunity to gain some serious mileage.
Kazakhstan’s industry had us three
chemical engineers salivating. We drove past several oil refineries, mines and
coal-fired power stations, prompting us to gleefully derive the Shrinking Core
Model for catalytic coking in a packed bed reactor. Discussion delved deeper to
a molecular level as we considered particle interaction, proving that the 12-6
Lennard-Jones potential’s trough is in fact minus epsilon. Once
Langmuir-Hinshelwood kinetics were introduced, Alf was reminded of the need to
equilibrate his daily mass balance and he commenced a purge (he was still
having diarrhoea issues to any chemical engineering muggle).
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| Pulses were racing when this came into view |
In the evening we found another motel
on the outskirts of Karaganda and tucked ourselves in for another film night,
this time it was watching Lucy. At least we thought it was Lucy, it was hard to
tell over Caleb’s snoring.
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| Another trucker's motel for the night |
Posted by: Rich