I've been making milk punch for friends as a gift for years now. On a lark I wanted to figure out how to produce it in larger batches with less manual labor and discovered the tip of the iceberg of what is the field of beverage filtration and food chemistry.
Turns out getting particulates out of a solution is a massive, massive industry with a large body of science, literature, and engineering practice behind it.
EDIT: Here's a few wiki entries I found as OK overviews. ChatGPT was handy for figuring out what relevant literature in the field was and terminology I could use to find more pertinent resources:
The thing about diy'ing audio (primarily speakers but also amps, DACs etc) is that you can get top of the line performance for a fraction of the market price. A $50,000 speaker setup that would bring tears to your eyes could be made for perhaps $5000. A DIY $500 kit can perform similar to a $2-3000 set of speakers. Open source amps with gerber files on github are amazing.
The biggest reason it's so easy to get amazing value is because that $600 speaker only has $150 of materials. Upgrading its $25 woofer to a $80 one would help a lot, but no company would do that and not sell it now for $1000 if they could.
However the biggest allure for me is not beating commercial systems on cost, but making what I want. A small speaker with deep base? Easy. Speakers with quasi-active noise cancellation behind them? Sure, why not. Speakers that'll make the most overpowered/fancy beach-boombox sound like a crappy toy? Simple.
The only limit is your imagination and time/money.
I'd very much recommend diyaudio.com, but be warned, parts of this field are mature while others are still in effective infancy. Also, being an engineer (electrical/mechanical) helps a lot, there's a ton of signals processing and electrical/mech oscillation.
Turns out getting particulates out of a solution is a massive, massive industry with a large body of science, literature, and engineering practice behind it.
EDIT: Here's a few wiki entries I found as OK overviews. ChatGPT was handy for figuring out what relevant literature in the field was and terminology I could use to find more pertinent resources:
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_engineering
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultrafiltration
3. Food Chemistry: https://www.amazon.com/Fennemas-Food-Chemistry-Srinivasan-Da...
4. Introduction to Food Engineering: https://www.sciencedirect.com/book/9780123985309/introductio...
5. Handbook of Food Engineering Practice: https://www.routledge.com/Handbook-of-Food-Engineering-Pract...