We have all the forms for the building finished and almost all are poured. As we have been pulling off all of the forms we can see all the good construction work that Dan Kienitz and Paul Hamilton have been doing. We are going to weld all the joists this afternoon as soon as we can get a stick welder. This should round us up for the rest of today (Saturday). Then on Sunday we are going to concrete the joists into place and put in some more block that will line up perfectly with the joists on each ends of the building.

Also the bathrooms will be 100% completed today. They are not pretty by any means, but they now all function. There was one bathroom that the school had worked on and was charged almost $3,000 dollars for it. We worked on 5 other bathrooms, and got them functioning equally well for around $200. This was due to the great leadership of David Malawey.

Today there is a small group of people who are staying at the agricultural school that we are at. They are staying there so that Kathy Donohue (registered nurse from Chicago) can do here teethbrushing educational seminar for them. Also Dr. Showalter and David Malawey are there doing a small site assessment at this school. They might be in need of a new building and also a potential site assessment.

That´s all I've got for today.

Posted by Mindy Limback at 04:02 PM in Engineers Without Borders | Permalink | add to del.icio.us| Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Everything is still going great. We are going to finish pouring columns today, if it doesn't rain. People are getting excited because everything is starting to look pretty good as far as getting everything completed. I personally am very excited to see how everything is progressing.

David Malawey is currently leading bathroom reparations, and all of the six bathrooms at the school are now functional, Two of the bathrooms at the beginning of the week did not function at all. Only a couple of toilets and sinks have yet to be fixed. He is also making an instruction manual so that if things break again it can easily be fixed again.

Today is market day in Solola, Guatemala, so there is a lot of cool food goods to find everywhere. It also seems that there is a soccer tournament going on right next door to the internet cafe we are at. Because of these two things the town is very busy and exciting today. It is pretty hard to travel anywhere because of the amount of people in the town.

That is all I have for today. If the shop is open tomorrow I will have more. If not this is probably the last time I´ll be able to update until Tuesday.

Posted by Mindy Limback at 04:00 PM in Engineers Without Borders | Permalink | add to del.icio.us| Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

No sooner than I finished my last letter it started raining here. Because of this we had to unfortunately cut our day several hours short. Because of this extra work had to be done yesterday and we were unable to spare workers so this is why I was unable to write yesterday.

Everything is going well here. The stairs for the school are completed and one bathroom is almost completely fixed. We are mostly focusing on the columns of the school building. We have several people currently framing the columns, while those leftover are constantly mixing concrete and pouring it into the columns. We hope to finish framing everything today and finish pouring tomorrow. We are also hoping to start putting up the first two roof trusses today.

We are all very worn out from all the work that we are doing, but are making sure we are keeping on task. When we went to lunch you could see the weary looks on peoples faces, but after another amazing meal from Claudia at her restaurant "Los Carretas de Jose´s" everyone felt far more refreshed and ready for another afternoons work. She has made us some wonderful Guatemalan dishes such as black beans eggs and tortillas. She has also made us feel a bit more a home with a couple of her meals, her club sandwich included.

Now I must get back to work so that we can hopefully finish soon.

Posted by Mindy Limback at 03:41 PM in Engineers Without Borders | Permalink | add to del.icio.us| Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

There is not a whole lot different today from yesterday, as far as what people are working on. We still have a group on the stairs, the school building, and the bathroom.

The group that is working on the stairs finished putting the first and lower set of stairs in place late yesterday. Today they have started working on hanging and putting the second set of stairs in place. It has become a slow process due to that they keep wearing out drill bits on the steel, but the stairs should be in place and most of the concrete poured on them by the end of the day, if it doesn't start raining.

The group that is working on the building are still pouring concrete to form the pillars of classrooms. We have almost all the rebar forms in places, we just now have the issue of building the forms and pouring the concrete in the forms. They are also finishing up the last couple rows of block that has to be laid in place. This also should be done by the end of the day, that is if the rain stays away.

The group that was working in the bathrooms was stalled for the first half of the day so that they could help lift the stairs into place. But now that the stairs are almost mounted the bathroom crew should be placing the new pipe and also pouring concrete to set the pipe permanently in place.

Today the registered nurse, Kathy Donohue, that traveled with us went from classroom to classroom handing out toothbrushes and toothpaste showing the children how to do it properly. Through the translations of both Phil McGee and Gabriel Olivio the kids thoroughly enjoyed the demonstration and the free toothbrushes after the show. We even saw a group of kids head straight to the sink at their recess and start brushing their teeth the way they were shown.

That is all for now... there should be more tomorrow.

Posted by Mindy Limback at 04:23 PM in Engineers Without Borders | Permalink | add to del.icio.us| Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Andrew Blair, leader of the Engineers Without Borders trip to Guatemala, shares this post about the Missouri S&T team's journey to Guatemala.

So far in Guatemala everything is going alright. Yesterday (Sunday May 18th) we flew out without a hitch. After leaving St. Louis around 5:45AM we spent approximately 4 and a half hours on two different planes. After we got off the planes we had to spend a bit more than 4 hours driving from Guatemala City to Solola.

Once we arrived in Solola we were surprised by our in country contact Mario Corzo that we had a slightly better place to stay than we originally thought. Instead of staying on the floor of the school that we are working at we were told that we could stay in a small house at an agriculture school on the other side of the city of Guatemala. We are still sleeping on the floor, but now have showers and mattress pads to sleep on. It makes the shock of living in a different country a little less. After we showed up at the house, we went out and got dinner from a local restaurant. Then we were so tired we all went to bed at the late hour of 9:00PM so that we could wake up for the next days work at 6:00AM

Now it is about 2:00 in Guatemala and we took a small break after eating so that we could send this letter. We currently have three different teams working at the school. One team is taking some prefabricated stairs and connecting them from the ground to the second floor of the school. Another group is finishing off the little block laying that needs to be done, and also pouring concrete to form the pillars of the rooms. The third group is currently working on disinfecting and washing out one of the bathroom units. The bathroom group is also chiseling out a clogged pipe from under the concrete urinal so that it can be replaced.

That is about all that is going on currently. I´ll have more information on what is being worked on at a future date.

Posted by Mindy Limback at 03:57 PM in Engineers Without Borders | Permalink | add to del.icio.us| Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This just in from our sister blog, Experience This!

A victory in the autocross race and solid performances in the endurance competition helped propel Missouri S&T's Formula SAE Team to its third top-10 finish in five years in the annual Formula SAE international competition, held May 15-17 at Michigan International Speedway in Brooklyn, Mich.

Congratulations to the Formula SAE Team for another fine finish. Visit the Experience This! student design blog for more news about the Formula SAE event and Missouri S&T's performance.

Posted by Andrew Careaga at 08:51 PM in Design | Permalink | add to del.icio.us| Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Missouri S&T researcher Glenn Morrison's paper about interfacial chemistry in indoor environments is the cover story for the latest issue of the journal Environmental Science & Technology. You might know Morrison better from his previous research on greasy hair and clean air, in which he pointed out that unwashed hair absorbs more ozone than cleaner hair.

In ES&T journal, Morrison discusses the state of indoor ozone research.

Chemistry taking place at the “human surface” is emerging as an important factor in our understanding of ozone exposure and reaction products. This became apparent in experiments with simulated aircraft cabins, densely occupied with human subjects. The researchers concluded that aircraft occupants are major ozone sinks -- larger than the carpet, seats, and a soiled HEPA filter combined. On the basis of questionnaires completed by the aircraft occupants, they concluded that ozone and its oxidation products had adverse effects on 12 of 29 self-reported symptoms. Evaluation of individual aircraft surfaces, in small-chamber experiments, confirmed the reactivity findings (14). Thus, the collective reactivity of humans in densely occupied settings, such as a classroom, will reduce ozone exposure and increase exposure to skin-oil reaction products. In studies of ozone reaction with human hair, researchers found that the ozone reaction probability for hair is large (>10–4) relative to other indoor surfaces (15). Model analysis suggests that the boundary layer of air surrounding the body, including the breathing zone, may become significantly ozone-depleted and oxidation-product-rich.

Posted by Andrew Careaga at 05:18 PM in Environment | Permalink | add to del.icio.us| Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Missouri S&T grad Michel Barsoum thinks the ancient Egyptians can teach us some things about materials science. At MIT, Barsoum recently presented evidence that a revolutionary kind of cement was used to put the Great Pyramids together 4,500 years ago.

Posted by Lance Feyh at 07:55 AM in Materials | Permalink | add to del.icio.us| Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Brazil's state-controlled oil company recently announced that it can "sink pipes and pump crude from Tupi, overcoming increasing heat and pressure at greater depths," but our resident petroleum expert, Shari Dunn-Norman ,says she's not so sure.

Gabrielli's schedule for tapping Tupi may be too ambitious because production technology tends to lag behind exploration technology by 5 to 10 years, said Shari Dunn-Norman, who teaches petroleum engineering at the Missouri University of Science and Technology in Rolla, Missouri.

``Production always lags behind our ability to find deposits in the deep water,'' said Dunn-Norman, a former Atlantic Richfield Co. engineer. ``They're being very aggressive.''

Via Bloomberg.

Posted by Mindy Limback at 08:15 PM in Energy | Permalink | add to del.icio.us| Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Every year, more than 30 billion water bottles are added to America's landfills, creating a mountainous environmental problem. But if research at Missouri S&T is successful, the plastic bottles of the future could literally disappear within four months of being discarded.

The days or weeks even that it might take you to throw away that plastic water bottle in back of your car is nothing compared to the time it takes to decompose in a landfill.

Try never.

But new research from Missouri University of Science and Technology in Rolla may help whittle decomposition time to about four months, helping solve a major environmental problem.

The research team is constructing new kinds of biodegradeable and bioavailable plastics to help reduce the amount of time the plastic stays in the nation's rapidly filling landfills. Bioavailable plastics contain substances that can be absorbed by living organisms such as plants.

Via St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Posted by Mindy Limback at 07:37 PM in Environment | Permalink | add to del.icio.us| Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)