Business Secret

Wahahha..i'm gonna reveal a business secret to everyone, hope my supervisor is not going to see this.

Let me give you a rough background of the concept of science behind this. The amount of water vapour in the air at a given time is usually less than that required to saturate the air. The Relative Humidity (RH) is the percent of saturation humidity, generally calculated in relation to the saturated vapour density. In short, RH = (actual vapour density)/ (saturated vapour density) * 100%.

Daily application of RH includes weather forecasting, adsorption, thermodynamics characterisation and prediciting the rheological properties of solid substance (ranging from food, pharmaceutical to catalyst industry).

My supervisor is the first person who commercialise (not sure whether he's the first who invented) this equipment called Dynamic Vapour Sorption (DVS). What this machine does is to generate an accurate amount of Relative Humidity in a microscale basis in a close system.

For example if you want to generate a RH of 30%, the machine will allow a 70volume/min of dry air to mix with a 30volume/min of water vapour. RH ranging from 0% to 99% can be obtained using the same principle. With this information, the Adsorption Isotherms (same temperature) of a substance can be studied thoroughly (believe me, they are very useful information). Below is the typical adsorption plot of a substance (Langmuir isotherm red and BET green)

However, current technology has limitation on controlling the RH at below 5% (called Henry Isotherm region). Many physicalchemists are very interested on the adsorption behaviour of different solids under the Henry's Region. There are still a lot of mysterious properties of a solid at this region which we believe is very useful information for the formulation studies.

So, if you could think of a way to generate a low RH from 0.1 to 5% and the method can be controlled steadily, I bet you have just made a big contribution to the industry plus thousands of dollars return profit.