Separation Processes
Linde Engineering Starts Up World’s First Plant for Extracting H2 from Natural Gas Pipelines Using Membrane Technology
Linde Engineering (Pullach, Germany) has officially started up the world’s first full-scale pilot plant in Dormagen, Germany (photo) to showcase how hydrogen can be separated from natural gas streams using Linde’s Hiselect powered by Evonik membrane technology. The process is…
Extracting high-quality MgSO4 from seawater desalination brine
A team of researchers, led by professor Myoung-Jin Kim, from Korea Maritime and Ocean University (Busan, South Korea; www.kmou.ac.kr), has developed a process that recovers calcium-free magnesium sulfate from seawater desalination brine (SDB). The process, described in a recent issue…
Process Commercialization: The 2021 Kirkpatrick Chemical Engineering Achievement Award
To honor the efforts of those chemical engineers and their companies that have successfully commercialized a new process for the first time, Chemical Engineering magazine has been be-stowing its Kirkpatrick Chemical Engineering Achievement Award since 1933. The aim of the…
Mining REEs from phosphogypsum
Last month, the Pennsylvania State University (Penn State; University Park, Pa.; www.psu.edu), Case Western Reserve University (Cleveland Ohio; www.case.edu) and Clemson University (S.C.; www.clemson.edu) received a $1.7-million National Science Foundation grant for a four-year project to recover rare earth elements…
Recovering REEs from unconventional sources
In October, researchers from Penn State and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL; Calif.; www.llnl.gov) described — in an article published in ACS Central Science — a new method that improves the extraction and separation of rare earth elements (REEs)…
Taking a Holistic Approach to Column Internals
Combining new and improved high-performance column internals and a whole-system view provides a comprehensive solution with more benefits Today’s economic and environmental pressures have chemical processors looking into projects that will help them achieve more throughput from existing columns while…
Facts At Your Fingertips: Cake Filtration Basics
Filtration is arguably the most common unit operation in the chemical process industries (CPI). Filtration processes can be divided into three broad categories: cake filtration, where the incoming slurry contains enough solid material to form a cake on the filter…
Air Liquide and BASF welcome support from European Innovation Fund for joint CCS project
Air Liquide S.A. (Paris, France) and BASF SE (Ludwigshafen, Germany) are planning to develop the world’s largest cross-border carbon capture and storage (CCS) value chain. The goal is to significantly reduce CO2 emissions at the industrial cluster in the port…
Improved process for recycling used motor oil produces higher-grade base oils
Front-end engineering design (FEED) is underway for a facility designed to de-contaminate and upgrade used motor oil from passenger vehicles into a higher-value product mix of base oils than is currently possible with existing motor-oil recycling processes, and in a…
Recovering phosphoric acid from sewage-sludge incineration ash
This month, SusPhos B.V. (Amsterdam, the Netherlands; www.susphos.com) is increasing the capacity ten-fold of its 25-kg/d pilot plant in Leeuwarden, the Netherlands. The pilot plant, which began operating in January, is being used to develop a process that recovers phosphorus…