Week 8: Does Amazon Prime Deliver Turmeric?

Lecture

A Monday without Engineering 113 at 4 o'clock was slightly different, but it was Memorial Day after all. The recorded lecture for the week focused on the week's research assignment, senior design projects, final projects, and plagiarism.

The end is close, but before it is time to relax and no longer think about update sheets and coffee concentration, a few more assignments must be completed. For week eight research, the focus is sources of raw materials, potential markets, the economics and sustainability of the industry process, as well as the pros and cons of other processing methods.

Once students were informed of our tasks for the week, we were also shown the schedule for this year's senior design presentations and were offered the link to view the presentations. It is crazy to think that before we know it, the freshmen chemical engineers will be seniors and presenting their research.

Although we are not presenting senior design projects, we will soon be recording or live presenting our research findings from the term as well as finalizing our written report. Looking back, it is amazing to see how much we were able to accomplish even with

COVID-19 which turned kitchens into coffee labs.

That being said, it is extremely important to be mindful of work created by others and do everything possible to avoid plagiarism. Sometimes it happens unintentionally, but the consequences of plagiarism are serious. The Drexel rules of plagiarism and academic integrity are made well known to students, but there is a tendency to skip over those few paragraphs. As we come to the end of the term, create presentations and edit final reports it is a priority to give credit where credit is due.

Lab

The focus of this week's lab was to research and better detail our industrial design process. After an extensive amount of time spent researching, we were able to compile a document which contained suppliers/vendors for the raw materials which will be used, potential markets, sale prices, economics and sustainability of the process.

Regarding the raw material aspect of the process, it is important to have fresh organic turmeric which we could purchase five pounds off Amazon from a vendor named Fiji Fresh for $37.99. Regarding the ethanol that will be used in extraction 55 gallons can be purchased for $2,585 from USP Kosher. Although there are plenty of vendors selling the necessary raw materials, it is important to ensure the vendors will be able to support an increase in supply-demand. This is not necessarily in their control as weather and pest damage plays a large role in crop growth. There could also be an increase in turmeric demand which the vendors may not be able to support.

Once the vendors and increase in supply were discussed, it was important to research potential markets and consider the competition, especially for selling price. The industrial design process would ultimately extract the curcumin from the turmeric which would eventually be turned into a pill with 500 mg of curcumin per pill and 80 pills in a bottle. These values were obtained by looking at other companies such as Nature Made and Puritan's Pride. The final pill product of curcumin would be sold to pharmacies as well as vitamin stores for approximately $14.99 as other companies sell fewer pills for a slightly cheaper price. To help ensure that the final product is still profitable for our company, we analyzed the reuse of raw materials which would include water and ethanol through the reclamation and treatment systems.

Selling curcumin for $14.99 will not make us millionaires overnight especially with the expenses of first opening an industrial process. The most expensive step is purchasing the necessary equipment and maintaining repairs, but as the years go on, the cost of continually purchasing raw turmeric would add up. To reduce the cost of turmeric, it would be extremely important to maximize the root when extracting curcumin. Another way to reduce the cost, as well as the process's carbon footprint, would be to create turmeric farmlands close to the factory as well as use energy from renewable sources.

Although solid-liquid extraction was decided upon, there are a few benefits as well as drawbacks. Solid-liquid extraction allows for reuse of materials after proper care as well as maximizes curcumin yield. A few drawbacks include the price of machinery and a large amount of energy required.

As the final details of the industrial design process are researched and put together, it is important to keep in mind our research from experiments, literature research, as well as our due date timeline because it is crazy to think about but only one week remains!