Retirement, radio and revisions

Alan Herod has spent much more than 175 minutes during the past year, revising a book he first published, along with his co-authors, in 2006.

10 years ago I published a book entitled Solid Fuels and Heavy Hydrocarbon Liquids – thermal characterization and analysis. The original authors were myself, Professor Rafael Kandiyoti of Imperial College London, and Professor Keith Bartle of Leeds University. Elsevier has recently asked us to write a revised edition, and this has taken us much of our time over the past year, along with a fourth author, Dr Trevor Morgan of the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute, Honolulu.

I’ve been retired for seven years now, so it has been quite a challenge to get back up to date with the literature.

The new edition includes a lot of new work of our own on detecting and characterising the large molecules in liquids derived from coal, in crude petroleum asphaltenes and in biomass tars using a range of separation techniques and novel analytical methods.

The first revision of the text included all the new work since completing the original version, but it became obvious that we had way too much material, so the editing process to meet the target page count was long and difficult.

I consider I have used my 175 minutes several times over during the year, but feel it was well worth the effort. I now have two books – 1st and 2nd editions, to show my grandchildren.