Max Babi, Metallurgist / Plasma Technologist / Writer / Trainer / Speaker - Pune, Maharashtra, India

    Max Babi's portrait




Max Babi:: "Humanity will perish if science  and economics rule the world"

BPP: Who are you?  And who you really are?

Max Babi: My name is Max Babi (or Mushtaq Ali Khan Babi) I'm 64 years old, metallurgist/plasma technologist/writer/trainer/speaker,  I am some exotic sort of a catalyst, I bring alive people and groups, I myself do not burn but I cause flare ups among others in a most positive manner, I inspire people, I like giving / teaching / mentoring,  I am a learner forever. My purpose in life is reduce the effect of an idiocy epidemic that is destroying us all… greed is not good. Collaboration is good, sharing is good, distributing is even better, and those who have been have-nots, need special attention.

BPP: If you could say something important to others who were listening, what would you tell them?

Max Babi: Let hope never die - do not grieve over lost opportunities or lost years. I have failed 38 times in my life and have come back much more powerful. I possess a unique will power and self-belief without which I would have perished long ago.

BPP:  What is your true dream, the one that keeps you up at night and if one day it were to come true you would feel peace and calmness in your heart?

Max Babi: I dream about talent hunting - I have a nose for hunting the best talent out of the underprivileged worlds that are invisible to most.  I dream about writing books, conducting workshops ( I am obsessed about Serendipity or ‘happy accidents’  that have been the leading cause of most of our learning in science and exploration. I want to do serious research in para-normal activitiesm, ESP sort of powers and show that science is too cynical. Humanity will perish if science + economics rule the world.

BPP: How is life currently for the people in your country and what would you wish for them and for the planet at large?

Max Babi: It is slightly better than a few decades ago. I wish global peace, less global warming and less wanton damage to eco-sphere. I want people to reconnect to Nature. I can do a lot there.

BPP: If you had a chance to be a child again would you choose the same life?

Max Babi:  No. I would focus more on  exploiting my special abilities and capabilities - I think I have not done that in an adequate measure.

Max Babi in Jazz Workshop

BPP:  What was the exact moment that you realized what you wanted to do with your life?  How did you feel at this very moment?

Max Babi: I can’t put my finger on one particular moment - this awareness has been trickling into my Mind for 30years now… however at this moment I feel a combination of peace with myself

And yet frustration for not having done enough….

Max Babi"s drawing for BPProject

BPP: Would you like to tell us something we didn’t ask until now?

Max Babi: I want to tell all the denizens of this wonderful planet to stop wrecking it. Commerce has caused us to become thick-skinned. We do not care if 250 species of living things disappear in just one day… this is a disgrace. We need to wake up.

Max BabI's article "The Change Age" for the "Care4Nature" Magazine, April 2012 Issue

                         Max BabI's article "The Change Age" for the "Care4Nature" Magazine, April 2012 Issue

 Max BabI's article "The Change Age" for the "Care4Nature" Magazine, April 2012 Issue

BPP: Apart of the questions of the Interview, we have the pleasure to feauture some more thoughts of Max Babi on his personal work: Transcreation & Plasma Technology:

TRANSCREATION

Max Babi: India has a lot of languages, over 1200 of them if you count the dialects. Out of these at least 26 are major languages spoken by tens of millions. Urdu is one of the most fascinating modern young language which has a history of about 600 years. Urdu is a curious amalgamation of Persian, Turkish, Arabic, and Hindustani (precursor of Hindi, now a national language). In the Persian tradition, Urdu literature is heavily romantic in nature, and quite a bit of that runs into the Sufi category -a sort of highly refined version of Islam.

Strangely Urdu has never been translated properly in poetical forms. Many experts believe that Urdu is too complex a language to be translated and English being a traders' language, falls short of achieving all the fine nuances, implied meanings and the metaphors alien to the European mind.

I believe, because I have been writing in both Urdu and English for 50+ years now, that competent translators do not exist.

Max Babi as a guest in "One life to ride" presentation published by Crossword Books

For one decade now, my obsession has been Transcreation. I take up a couplet in Urdu, assimilate it fully and then sleep over it. One day I decide to write it as a fresh newly conceived poem in English without losing sight of the original idea, theme even the hue. As a rule my English trancreations have come out superbly and charmed many scholars around the world.

Naturally the question of plagiarism may spring up suddenly in future, I was advised by an American poet. Because, I am still working on a poetical idea conceived by someone else ! Legally it is plagiarism. This thought made me panic. I therefore started writing my own Urdu couplets, longer rhymed verses and snippets. Then I started transcreating them. 

Many of my transcreations exist at www.gather.com, at Caferati.com and at facebook under My Notes:

These are my passionate creations, produced with a lot of blood sweat and tears.

PLASMA TECHNOLOGY:

Plasma - The 4^th State Of Matter

‘Plasma’ in physics (not to be confused with biological plasma which is a colourless fluid in our blood) signifies the 4^th state of matter. The other ordinary states are solid, liquid, and gaseous. Most peculiarly, everything in the universe, just outside our own ‘atmosphere’ exists in its plasma state, thus we have to spend energy to convert neutral matter into an active plasma state -it can be a high voltage discharge or very high temperatures- and once this energy supplied is stopped, the matter becomes neutral once again, sort of ‘falling back’ in to the normal, ordinary form. I often feel about our universe that we are rather like fish in the ocean, we swim in a sea but cannot say much about water. We swim in a universe made of materials in plasma state and we have only begun to understand what it means.

Coming back to earth, plasma generation involves release of energy which can be in any form or a mixture of many diverse types i.e. heat, light, vibration, noise, radiation, charged particles, electrons, etc. It is also a peculiar fact that Georg Siemens of Germany used a plasma in the world’s first electric arc furnace two centuries ago, however he did not focus on it nor name it. That was done much later in late 1920s by the Nobel Prize winning American physicist, Dr. E. Langmuir, who noticed a close resemblance between the semi-fluid jelly and the plasma inside a glass tube. It would tumble and move sluggishly like jelly so he used the Greek word plasma for something that was diffuse. Sort of reminds us of the colourless fluid in our blood, which also looks like thinned jelly.

Lightning, aurora borealis, ball lightning,  and the sun are familiar examples of plasmas in nature

Today after 40 years in this discipline, plasma technology, I have some pretty interesting stories to tell, and insights to share. It may look impressive to the outsiders that there are many kinds of plasma devices made and used today based on different types of plasmas, i.e. {} thermal plasmas or hot plasmas } non-equilibrium or cold plasmas.

The former are very conspicuous in industry, we see plasma welding / cutting / spraying / cladding  / melting / refining / alloying  / gas-heating / ‘fracking’ or fracturing of rocks and chemical reactions. The latter are comparatively new but have found 1000s of uses already in every aspect of human life… in fact the great Metallurgist Prof. R. D. Bunshaw of Mumbai who spent a lifetime at UCLA, in the U.S., once remarked in 1992 that in the coming millennium, no aspect of manufacturing will remain untouched by the Plasma. He was indeed right. Today textiles can be made hygroscopic (wettable) or hydrophobic (un-wettable) by a plasma treatment usually in the same device simply by changing the plasma parameters. Plasma displays are widely used in TVs, display boards, announcement panels in public places and in giant-sized panels as tall as ten storey high buildings.

The story of plasma is intriguing in many respects – for instance, long periods intervened between its discovery ( Sir Michael Faraday did that, so did others fascinated with vacuum and electrical currents) and building of an actual device that could hold a plasma, or harness its wild energy output. Thermal plasmas in cutting and spraying category often generate up to 100,000 degrees Celsius heat – even ceramics can vaporize under such conditions. So how does one contain such an enormous amount of energy? Supercooled super-conducting magnets can generate powerful fields that contain a plasma which may possess millions of degrees temperature, but for very brief periods. That is for the laboratories. Industrially, one needs a portable device ideally speaking, to hold and manipulate with our hands. Robert Gauge, an engineer working with Union Carbide Inc. in US, patented the first-ever plasma melting torch, on lines of Siemen’s work which also involved steel melting. His brilliant invention was, how to contain the plasma. Gauge had noticed that water-cooled copper is the best material to allow processing of extremely high temperatures, as he may have noticed gas welders placing cold-water rags on portions where copper welding is not desired. So he designed a ‘nozzle’ with a tiny orifice, to hold the plasma blown out from a portable ‘plasma torch/ gun’ which was entirely water-cooled internally. This was in 1959, when aluminium alloys were being used extensively in post –invention of Jet engine era, and cutting them was tedious, expensive and messy. The plasma torch could easily cut even stainless steels, another headache-causing material. After this, thermal  plasma applications proliferated globally in a very short time.

I cut my own teeth on plasma, right from my first serious job in industry where a small scale unit in Baroda, Gujarat, had introduced plasma cutting machines – in nearly one decade, we had sold more than 500 systems in India, some of them high powered ones capable of cutting up to 150mm thick stainless steel at impressive speeds, and one landmark achievement of underwater plasma cutting (remote controlled) in an atomic reactor for disposing of the contaminated stainless steel trays holding spent fuel pellets. Those days, complexities in welding were coming to the fore, and plasma welding, later micro-plasma welding held sway on other processes. In the process, I met with a lot of researchers, scientists, businessmen/women, and entrepreneur and provided a lot of useful feedback for solving industrial problems via the use of thermal plasma technology. This involved so much travelling and meeting new business contacts that often I would be away 11 months in a year –I got to see some exciting establishments including the nuclear power stations and the hybrid fast-breeder reactor, etc. Also, large fertilizer plants, huge fabrication workshops, machine shops, suppliers to the aerospace research programme, and aviation sector too.

I was the first person in India to have assembled my own plasma spray system, rather a small one, 30 kW power rating but I ran it in my jobshop for about two years, solving a lot of industrial problems. Plasma spray is such a magical process it can coat anything on to anything :

1. Metal on to metal  ( titanium on to cast iron for value addition)

2. Metal on to non-metal ( aluminium on to glass epoxy substrate or copper onto ceramic)

3. Non-metal on to metal ( aluminia or chromia on to stainless steel)

4. Non-metal on to non-metal ( Teflon on to ceramics).

Later on I developed, on my own, plasma transferred arc cladding (heavy overlay) systems and carried out jobwork commercially for some years. In the mean time the Institute for Plasma Research was developing plasma nitriding process –entirely a new area of work as it involved a new type of plasma for me, the non-equilibrium plasma or the low pressure regime plasma working inside vacuum of a low order. They wanted a commercial partner and my company joined hands with them. The usual teething trouble and technical hiccups later, we did try out a bit of commercial samples and got good feedback. However I chose to shut down the operations –since the promoters were facing a good deal of labour problems and management  issues, and joined a Multinational company at Pune – Multi Arc India Ltd., whose focus on plasma aided processing was of much higher order, as they were operating more than 16 PVD reactors – for ‘thin film superhard coatings’ both for industrial and aesthetic applications. Physical vapour deposition, is a group of vacuum based processes wherein very thin coatings of about one micron ( that is 1000^th of a millimetre) thick coatings would be applied at low processing temperatures. These are plasma-based processes, and the vacuum plasma scene was a fertile ground for me to learn much more, and later on add my own unit, for plasma nitriding, on a commercial scale. I had developed more than 150 industrial applications, and pioneered work in many areas including ‘duplex treatments’ which use a plasma nitriding process followed by a PVD thin film coating of TiN (titanium nitride). This results in far greater performance enhancement and working lifespan increase.

A pulsed plasma thruster for space applications…

I became an entrepreneur, made and supplied 6 plasma nitriding systems, most of which are still working, including one at  Taipeh in Taiwan. During this phase also a lot of new applications were entrusted to me, and I solved nearly all industrial problem –excepting those which required much more sophistication in the plasma nitriding system, then beyond our limited means. But the learning curve continued, industrial contacts multiplied, and slowly I shifted my focus to industrial training, some teaching at colleges, and workshops so as to share my wealth of experiences. I continue to do that even today.

The plasma technology scene in India has been successful only scratching the surface, much more remains unexplored. On the whole, it could be in line with the status of plasma technology globally, which was neatly summed up by the famous Czech metallurgist, H. Dombovsky who wrote in his preface to the only textbook on Plasma Metallurgy with the eponymous title, “ … the plasma science and technology are at a breakthrough point, however at present the researchers and technologists remain almost like the primitive tribes in Papua New Guinea who have just discovered a running Diesel Generator and are busy dancing to its rhythm. “  The real purpose is unknown to them… Hope lies with research being done on using plasma not for weaponry but for weather control ( we could generate far more ozone than naturally produced, simply by having plasma towers that would ionize the air) or like the work of University of Washington who have developed plasma thrusters (rockets) that do not need any fuel, and can travel forever without needing energy. They work by developing a plasma field around themselves, repelling the gravitational force of the earth, later that of the other planets, then the sun and then the nearest star… thus they would not need any fuels. Their electrical needs would be met by solar energy, or any other star’s radiation nearby. Russians had developed these thrusters way back in 1964, and somehow the political compulsions did not allow the field to grow.

A M2P2 (Mini-Magnetospheric Plasma Propulsion) system

The future of plasma is bright.

If you want to learn more about Max Babi, visit:

http://maxinchennai.blogspot.com/

http://maxbabi.wordpress.com/

http://www.ryze.com/go/maxbabi