Do the W.L. Gore Sales Engineer visited today.

“One of the sales engineers for W.L. Gore of Gore-Tex fame visited me this morning to discuss the application of some of their products. We use their PTFE membrane for filtering ambient air in some of our thermal exchange systems. Anyhoo... some interesting things I learned today.

- W.L Gore Employees do not receive any sort of discount on any Gore apparel. i.e. he couldn't get me a free jacket or pants or shoes, etc. What kind of salesman is that?!?!?!
-He admitted there were other membranes that performed better in clothing applications... luckily he's not the sales engineer for their Gore-Tex line of fabric backed membranes.
-Now I thought the most interesting part of the conversation was when we were pouring over data discussing which filter to use in our application. They can determine the life of the filter by knowing the geographic location and how much air we plan on moving through the filter. Gore has done a TON or research on air quality and has a ton of data on amount of particles (pollution) suspended in the air for any given region all over the world. Looking over the raw data showing how many million particles were suspended in the air per cubic foot of air... the WORST cities in the United states were often 2-4x's less polluted then the worst cities in some European countries and 6-10x's less polluted then cities in south America or China. I can't imagine how bad China's air must be... they were by far and away the worst of the air polluters. The worst cities in the states were in the 40-50 pcf while the worst cities in china were upwards to 400-500 pcf.”

“Crap... I hate when I have a typo in the title :D”

“Ha Ha!
(In my best Simpson's voice)”

“More incentive to flee the cities and live in the backcountry.”

“NS, the backcountry's not much better...many of our national parks have worse pollution than the cities”