Tag: water cycle

Categories
Home experiments Observations Science history slow

Missing matter

soya latte at the coffee jar camden
Not one made by me! But instead a soya-latte at the Coffee Jar a couple of years ago.

During these strange times of working from home, perhaps you, like me, have been preparing a lot more coffee. For me this has included, not just my regular V60s, but a type of cafe-au-lait for someone who used to regularly drink lattes outside. My previous-latte-drinker turns out to be a little bit discerning (the polite way of phrasing it) and so prefers the coffee made in a similar way each day. Which is why I’ve been weighing the (oat) milk I’ve been using.

So, each morning to prepare a coffee, I’ve been using a V60 recipe from The Barn and then, separately, weighing out 220g of refrigerated oat milk into a pan that I then heat on the stove. Generally I heat the milk for just over 5 minutes until it is almost simmering whereupon I pour it into a mug (with 110 – 130g of coffee inside – depending on the coffee). Being naturally lazy, I keep the cup on the scales so that it is easier to pour the milk in and then, completely emptying the pan into the coffee, the scales register an increase of mass (of milk) in the cup of 205-210g. Which means about 10-15g of milk goes missing each morning.

Now clearly it is not missing as such, it has just evaporated, but it does prompt a question: can this tell us anything about the physics of our world? And to pre-empt the answer, it actually tells us a great deal. But to see how, we need to go on an historical diversion to just over three hundred years ago, when Edmond Halley was presenting an experiment to the Royal Society in London. The experiment shares a number of similarities with my heated oat milk pan. It was later written into a paper which you can read online: “An estimate of the quantity of vapour raised out of the sea by the warmth of the Sun; derived from an experiment shown before the Royal Society at one of their late meetings: by E Halley“.

lilies on water, rain on a pond, droplets
Coffee, evaporation, clouds, rain, rivers, seas, evaporation. Imagining the water cycle by making coffee.

Halley heated a pan of water to the temperature of “the Air in our hottest summers” and then, keeping the temperature constant, placed the pan on a set of scales to see how much water was lost over 2 hours. The temperature of the air in “our hottest summers” cannot have been very high, perhaps 25-30C and there was no evaporation actually seen in the form of steam coming from the pan (unlike with my milk pan). Nonetheless, Halley’s pan lost a total of 13.4g (in today’s units) of water over those two hours.

Halley used this amount to estimate, by extrapolation, how much water evaporated from the Mediterranean Sea each day. Arguing that the temperature of the water heated that evening at the Royal Society was similar to that of the Mediterranean Sea and that you could just treat the sea as one huge pan of water, Halley calculated that enough water evaporated to explain the rains that fell. This is a key part of the water cycle that drives the weather patterns in our world. But Halley took one further step. If the sea could produce the water for the rain, and the rain fed the rivers, was the flow of the rivers enough to account for the water in the Mediterranean Sea and, specifically, how much water was supplied to the sea compared to that lost through the evaporation? Halley estimated this by calculating the flow of water underneath Kingston Bridge over the Thames. As he knew how many (large) rivers flowed into the Mediterranean, Halley could calculate a very rough estimate of the total flow from the rivers into the Mediterranean.

Grecian, Devereux, Coffee house London
A plaque outside the (old) Devereux pub, since refurbished. The Devereux pub is on the site of the Grecian Coffee House which was one of the places that Halley and co used to ‘retire’ to after meetings at the Royal Society.

The estimates may seem very rough, but they were necessary in order to know if it was feasible that there could be a great water cycle of rain, rivers, evaporation, rain. And although Halley was not the first to discuss this idea (it had been considered by Bernard Palissy and Pierre Perrault before him), this idea of a quantitative “back of the envelope” calculation to prompt more thorough research into an idea, is one that is still used in science today: we have an idea, can we work out, very roughly, on the back of an envelope (or more often on a serviette over a coffee) if the idea is plausible before we write the research grant proposal to study it properly.

So, to return to my pan of oat milk simmering on the stove. 15g over 5 minutes at approaching 100C is a reasonable amount to expect to lose. Only, we can go further than this now because we can take the extra data (from the thermostats we have in our house and the Met Office observations for the weather) of the temperature of your kitchen and the relative humidity that day and use this to discover how these factors affect the evaporative loss. Just as for Halley, it may be an extremely rough estimate. However, just as for Halley, these estimates may help to give us an understanding that is “one of the most necessary ingredients of a real and Philosophical Meteorology” as Halley may have said before he enjoyed a coffee at one of the Coffee Houses that he, Newton and others would retire to after a busy evening watching water evaporate at the Royal Society.

Categories
General Observations Science history Sustainability/environmental Tea

Why politicians should drink loose leaf tea

Coffee Corona
Notice the rainbow pattern around the reflected light spot?
The universe is in a cup of coffee but to understand rising sea levels, it’s helpful to look at tea.

The universe is in a glass of wine. So said Richard Feynman. It has been the focus of this website to concentrate instead on the universe in a cup of coffee, partly because it is much easier to contemplate a coffee over breakfast. However there are times when contemplating a cup of tea may be far more illuminating. Such was the case last week: if only a politician had paused for a cup of tea before commenting on rising sea levels.

There are many reasons to drink loose leaf tea rather than tea made with a bag. Some would argue that the taste is significantly improved. Others, that many tea bags contain plastic and so, if you are trying to reduce your reliance on single-use plastic, loose leaf tea is preferable. Until last week though, it had not occurred to me that brewing a cup of tea with a mesh ball tea infuser (or a similar strainer) was a great way to understand the magnitude of our problem with rising sea levels. If a stone were to enter a pond, the pond-level would rise; if a spherical tea strainer (full of loose leaf tea) were to be placed in a cup, the soon-to-be-tea level would rise.

Clearly, because we know our physics, we would not place a strainer of tea into an existing cup of hot water as we know the brewing process relies on diffusion and turbulence, not just diffusion alone. So what we more commonly observe in the cup is actually a tea-level fall as we remove the straining ball. Fortunately, we can calculate the tea level decrease, h:

A schematic of the tea brewing process

My cylindrical tea mug has a radius (d) of 3.5cm. The radius (r) of the mesh ball is 2cm. We’ll assume that the tea leaves completely expand filling the mesh ball so that the ball becomes a non-porous sphere. Clearly this bit is not completely valid and would anyway create a poor cup of tea, but it represents a worst-case scenario and so is good as a first approximation.

Volume of water displaced = volume of mesh ball

πd²h = (4/3)πr³

A bit of re-arrangement means that the height of the tea displaced is given by

h = 4r³/(3d²)

h = 0.87 cm

This answer seems quite high but we have to remember that the mesh ball is not completely filled with tea and so the volume that it occupies is not quite that of the sphere. Moreover, when I check this answer experimentally by making a cup of tea, the value is not unreasonable. Removing the mesh-ball tea strainer does indeed lead to a significant (several mm) reduction in tea level.

Earth from space, South America, coffee
Assuming we are truly interested in discovering more about our common home, we can gain a lot through contemplating our tea.
The Blue Marble, Credit, NASA: Image created by Reto Stockli with the help of Alan Nelson, under the leadership of Fritz Hasler

What does this have to do with politicians? Last week a congressman from Alabama suggested that the observed rising sea levels could be connected with the deposition of silt onto the sea bed from rivers and the erosion of cliffs such as the White Cliffs of Dover. If only he had first contemplated his tea. Using a “back of the envelope” calculation similar to that above, it is possible to check whether this assertion is reasonable. As the surface area of the oceans is known and you can estimate a worst-case value for the volume of the White Cliffs falling into the sea, you can calculate the approximate effect on sea levels (as a clue, in order to have a significant effect, you have to assume that the volume of the White Cliffs is roughly equal to the entire island of Great Britain).

Mr Brooks comments however do have another, slightly more tenuous, connection with coffee. His initial suggestion was that it was the silt from rivers that was responsible for the deposition of material onto the sea bed that was in turn causing the sea level to rise. About 450 years ago, a somewhat similar question was being asked about the water cycle. Could the amount of water in the rivers and springs etc, be accounted for by the amount of rain that fell on the ground? And, a related question, could the amount of rain be explained by the amount of evaporation from the sea?

The initial idea that the answer to both of those questions was “yes” and that together they formed the concept of the “water cycle” was in part due to Bernard Palissy. Palissy is now known for his pottery rather than his science but he is the author of a quote that is very appropriate for this case:

“I have had no other book than the heavens and the earth, which are known to all men, and given to all men to be known and read.”

Reflections on a cup of tea.

Attempts to quantify the problem and see if the idea of the water cycle was ‘reasonable’ were made by Pierre Perrault (1608-80) in Paris and Edmond Halley (1656-1742) in the UK. Perrault conducted a detailed experiment where he measured the rain fall over several years in order to show that the amount of rain could account for the volume of water in the Seine. Halley on the other hand, measured the amount of evaporation from a pan of heated water and used this value to estimate the evaporation rate from the Mediterranean Sea. He then estimated the volume of water flowing into that sea from a comparison to the flow of the water in the Thames at Kingston. Together (but separately) Perrault and Halley established that there was enough water that evaporated to form rain and that this rain then re-supplied the rivers. Both sets of calculations required, in the first place, back of the envelope type calculations, as we did above for the tea-levels, to establish if the hypotheses were reasonable.

If you missed the coffee connection, and it was perhaps quite easy to do so, the question that Halley studied concerned the rate of evaporation as a function of the water’s temperature. This is something that is well known to coffee drinkers. Secondly however, one of Halley’s experiments about the evaporating water was actually performed at a meeting of the Royal Society. It is known that after such meetings, the gathered scientists would frequently adjourn to a coffee house (which may have been the Grecian or, possibly more likely, Garraways). As they enjoyed their coffee would they have discussed Halley’s latest results and contemplated their brew as they did so?

What this shows is that sometimes it is productive to contemplate your coffee or think about your tea. Notice what you observe, see if you can calculate the size of the effect, consider if your ideas about the world are consistent with your observations of it. But in all of it, do pause to slow down and enjoy your tea (or coffee).

Categories
General Home experiments Observations Science history slow

Theme on a V60

bloom on a v60
V60 bubbles. There is much to be gained by slowing down while brewing your coffee.

Preparing a coffee with a pour-over brewer such as a V60 is a fantastic way to slow down and appreciate the moment. Watching anti-bubbles dance across the surface as the coffee drips through, inhaling the aroma, hearing the water hit the grind and bloom; a perfect brewing method for appreciating both the coffee and the connectedness of our world. The other week, while brewing a delightful Mexican coffee from Roasting House¹, I noticed something somewhat odd in the V60. Having placed it on the kitchen scales and, following brewing advice, measured the amount of coffee, I poured the first water for the bloom and then slowly started dripping the coffee through. Nothing unusual so far and plenty of opportunity to inhale the moment. But then, as I poured the water through the grind, I noticed the scales losing mass. As 100g of water had gone through, so the scales decreased to 99g then 98g and so on. It appeared the scales were recording the water’s evaporation.

science in a V60
Bubbles of liquid dancing on the surface of a brewing coffee.

It is of course expected that, as the water evaporates, so the mass of the liquid water left behind is reduced. This was something that interested Edmond Halley (1656-1742). Halley, who regularly drank coffee at various coffee houses in London including the Grecian (now the Devereux pub), noted that it was probable that considerable weights of water evaporated from warm seas during summer. He started to investigate whether this evaporating vapour could cause not only the rains, but also feed the streams, rivers and springs. As he told a meeting of the Royal Society, these were:

“Ingredients of a real and Philosophical Meteorology; and as such, to deserve the consideration of this Honourable Society, I thought it might not be unacceptable, to attempt, by Experiment, to determine the quantity of the Evaporations of Water, as far as they arise from Heat; which, upon Tryal, succeeded as follows…”²

Was it possible that somehow Halley’s demonstration of some three hundred years ago was being replicated on my kitchen scales? Halley had measured a pan of water heated to the “heat of summer” (which is itself thought provoking because it shows just how recent our development of thermometers has been). The pan was placed on one side of a balance while weights were removed on the other side to compensate the mass lost by the evaporating water. Over the course of 2 hours, the society observed 233 grains of water evaporate, which works out to be 15g (15 ml) of water over 2 hours. How did the V60 compare?

Rather than waste coffee, I repeated this with freshly boiled water poured straight into the V60 that was placed on the scales. In keeping with it being 2017 rather than 1690, the scales I used were, not a balance, but an electronic set of kitchen scales from Salter. The first experiment combined Halley’s demonstration with my observation while brewing the Mexican coffee a couple of weeks back. The V60 was placed directly on the scales and 402g of water just off the boil was poured into it. You can see what happened in the graph below. Within 15 seconds, 2 g had evaporated. It took just a minute for the 15g of water that Halley lost over 2 hours (with water at approximately 30 C) to be lost in the V60. After six minutes the rate that the mass was being lost slowed considerably. The total amount lost over 12 minutes had been 70g (70ml).

evaporation V60 in contact with scales
A V60 filled with 400g of water just off the boil seemed to evaporate quite quickly when placed directly on the scales.

Of course, you may be asking, could it be that the scales were dodgy? 70g does seem quite a large amount and perhaps the weight indicated by the scales drifted over the course of 12 minutes. So the experiment could be repeated with room temperature water. Indeed there did appear to be a drift on the scales, but it seemed that the room temperature water got moderately heavier rather than significantly lighter. A problem with the scales perhaps but not one that explains the quantity of water that seems to have evaporated from the V60.

control
Hot water (red triangles) loses more mass than room temperature water (grey squares).

Could the 70g be real? Well, it was worth doing a couple more experiments before forming any definite conclusions. Could it be that the heat from the V60 was affecting the mass measured by the electronic scales? After all, the V60 had been placed directly on the measuring surface, perhaps the electronics were warming up and giving erroneous readings. The graph below shows the experiment repeated several times. In addition to the two previous experiments (V60 with hot water and V60 with room temperature water placed directly on the scales), the experiment was repeated three more times. Firstly the V60 was placed on a heat proof mat and then onto the scales and filled with 400g of water. Then the same thing but rather than on 1 heat proof mat, three were placed between the kitchen scales and the V60. This latter experiment was then repeated exactly to check reproducibility (experiment 4).

You can see that the apparent loss of water when the V60 was separated from direct contact with the scales was much reduced. But that three heat proof mats were needed to ensure that the scales did not warm up during the 12 minutes of measurement. Over 12 minutes, on three heat proof mats, 14g of water was lost in the first experiment and 17g in the repeat. This would seem a more reasonable value for the expected loss of water through evaporation out of the V60 (though to get an accurate value, we would need to account for, and quantify the reproducibility of, the drift on the scales).

V60 Halley
The full set: How much water was really lost through evaporation?

Halley went on to estimate the flow of water into the Mediterranean Sea (which he did by estimating the flow of the Thames and making a few ‘back of the envelope’ assumptions) and so calculate whether the amount of water that he observed evaporating from his pan of water at “heat of summer” was balanced by the water entering the sea from the rivers. He went on to make valuable contributions to our knowledge of the water cycle. Could you do the same thing while waiting for your coffee to brew?

Let me know your results, guesses and thoughts in the comments section below (or on Twitter or Facebook).

¹As this was written during Plastic Free July 2017, I’d just like to take the opportunity to point out that Roasting House use no plastic in their coffee packaging and are offering a 10% discount on coffees ordered during July as part of a Plastic Free July promotion, more details are here.

²E Halley, “An estimate of the quantity of vapour….” Phil. Trans. 16, p366 (1686-1692) (link opens as pdf)

Categories
Coffee review General Observations Sustainability/environmental Tea

Reduce, Re-use, Recycle at Attendant

The outside of Attendant on Foley St
Attendant Coffee, Foley St

I was not initially going to do a cafe-physics review of Attendant. It wasn’t that I didn’t enjoy the coffee, I did. I had a very well prepared V60 which went very well with a lovely chocolate brownie. Nor was it that there was nothing to see at Attendant. No, it was quite the opposite. Part of the point of the Attendant seems to be its location. You see, if you were not aware of it already, Attendant is to be found in a (no-longer-used), underground, gentlemen’s toilet. Although they have been thoroughly cleaned, various fixtures (19th century urinals and cisterns) remain in place. Modern (deliberate) graffiti adorns the walls as you walk in. Understandably, there are no windows to gaze out of in this café. It is, in many ways, a very interesting place to visit and the coffee is certainly worth a visit too. However, it is difficult to do a review which is, after all, about noticing something unusual, when the former use of this space is almost shouting at you. I thought about doing a review based on how the shape of the coffee cup can influence the flavour of  the coffee that you perceive. Yet somehow, writing a review on anything other than the fact that this is a re-use of an interesting space seemed, almost, perverse. So I left it. Until that is, UK Coffee Week came along.

UK Coffee Week raises awareness and money for Project Waterfall which in turn aims to help provide clean water and sanitation for coffee growing communities. Currently, Project Waterfall works in three countries, Tanzania, Rwanda and Ethiopia. In these countries a large number of the rural population lack basic access to drinking water while a greater number do not have access to sanitation facilities. Clearly this can lead to health problems. The World Health Organisation estimates that world wide, the drinking water of 1.8m people is contaminated with faeces, while 0.5 million people per year die from diarrhoeal diseases including cholera.

Interesting glassware at the Attendant
Interesting presentation. Coffee at the Attendant.

Perhaps, while sitting in cafés or having breakfast at home, we have a tendency to take water for granted. Certainly I will admit that I can. I’m sitting here writing this enjoying a great cup of coffee with a few biscuits both of which took water to produce. Beyond the obvious water in the kettle for the coffee and the water used for the dough for the biscuits, there is the ‘hidden’ water. The water used to irrigate the coffee crops and the wheat fields or to process the coffee cherry towards the green bean stage. The water used in generating the electricity used to bake the biscuits, or roast the coffee. The water used to clean the utensils between coffee roasts/biscuit batches so that we don’t get food poisoning. The list could go on. Indeed, the UN estimates that producing 1 cup of coffee requires 140 L of water. This figure though presumably cannot include the private water needs of the individuals who work on the coffee plantations. We all need water and we all need it to be clean.

So, in thinking about our water consumption (and the water consumption of those who help us to enjoy our coffee), we can do a few things during this coffee week 2016. Firstly, we could make a donation towards the work of Project Waterfall (here) or a similar charity that is working to provide clean water and adequate sanitation to those who don’t have it. Secondly, we could take the prompt from Attendant and start to think about where our water comes from. Why from Attendant? Well if you were living on the International Space Station or, to a lesser degree, in Singapore, this question may have an obvious answer. For the rest of us, we are often a little bit removed from direct water recycling, but it’s worth looking more closely at Singapore because they have developed a water strategy that may be of use for more of us in the future.

Reclaimed water NEWater, Singapore
30% of water supplied in Singapore is ‘reclaimed’. Where does your drinking water come from?

Singapore has a population of just over 5.5m (London: 8.6m) with a land area of 719.1 km². As an island, it is surrounded by water and so you may think that water is not a problem for the inhabitants of the city-state. But the water surrounding Singapore is the salt water of the sea and so not easily converted into drinking water. While looking for a solution towards a self-sufficient water supply, Singapore decided to try the recycling route. Through a scheme called NEWater, currently 30% of Singapore’s water supply is from  ‘reclaimed’ water (for reasons that may be obvious, they avoid the word ‘recycled’). The Singaporean authorities aim to make this 55% by 2060. Waste water produced in Singapore undergoes a process of micro-filtration (which takes out suspended particles), reverse osmosis and UV disinfection before being reintroduced to the water supply system. Although most of this reclaimed water is used for industrial processes, the reclaimed water can be added to Singapore’s reservoirs so that it will go into the drinking water supply.

A similar process is used on the International Space Station but there, as it is a closed environment, it is not just the waste water that goes down the drain that is ‘reclaimed’ but the water exhaled by the astronauts and the lab animals on the station. On Earth this would evaporate into the atmosphere, contribute to cloud formation and then rain back down closing the greater water cycle in that way. On the space station, the fact that it is a closed environment means that this moisture too can be ‘reclaimed’. By recycling the water in this way, the inhabitants of the space station avoid having to require too many costly water deliveries from the Earth.

Perhaps, while drinking our coffee (or tea, or even water) today, we can take five minutes to consider where our water comes from as well as considering whether those who contribute to our brew have adequate water supplies themselves. And as it is coffee week, here is that link again to Project Waterfall (Donation button at the bottom of the main Project Waterfall page). Enjoy your coffee.

Note added August 2017: It is with some regret that I have to say that Attendant is not a good place to go if you suffer from allergies. They have started serving almond milk and (according to a Twitter Direct Message received from the Attendant Team) do not adequately clean their steam wand between drinks so as to prevent cross contamination. Their advice to me was that I “should not have any hot drinks or food at our premises as we do not operate a nut free environment at our stores”. There are many good cafes to visit if you suffer from nut allergies, but please avoid this one (or just have a black coffee and enjoy the atmosphere).