In The News
A quick way to tell when to pick cotton
An instrument called the Cottonscope, which automatically measures cotton maturity in 25 s, has been developed by CSIRO Cotton Research Unit (Melbourne, Australia; www.csiro.au). The unit’s leader, Stuart Gordon, says the instrument has been used to measure when a crop…
Commercial production of carbon nanotubes
This month, Showa Denko K. K. (Tokyo, Japan; www.sdk.co.jp) will begin marketing its carbon-nanotube (CNT) product, tradenamed VGCF-X. The company produces the CNTs in its new, 400-ton/yr production plant at its Oita facility, and plans to ramp up production to…
A CO2-to-fuel process demonstrated
Scientists at Carbon Sciences Inc. (Santa Barbara, Calif.; www.carbonsciences.com) have successfully demonstrated a CO2-to-fuel process that proceeds under mild conditions using fluegas emissions as a carbon dioxide source and brackish water as a hydrogen source. The modular, three-step process is…
The Road to Recovery
Like most other businesses, engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) firms have felt the pinch of the economic downturn. While EPCs that specialize in building processing plants are optimistic that recent global interest in renewable and bioprocessing projects to create alternative…
April Chementator Briefs
A hard biomaterial Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Applied Materials Research (IFAM; Bremen, Germany; www.ifam.fraunhofer.de) have developed a granulate form of a biomaterial that may replace titanium used as screws and other hardware in medical applications.…
Total announces plans to repurpose its Dunkirk refinery site and more business briefs
Outotec to deliver a copper smelter for plant in China March 16, 2010 — Outotec Oyj (Espoo, Finland; http://www.outotec.com) has been awarded a contract by Tongling Non-Ferrous Metals Group for the design and delivery of a new copper smelter to…
Pöyry awarded pulp-mill engineering contract in Brazil
Eldorado Celulose e Papel Ltda (Brazil) has awarded Pöyry Plc. (Helsinki, Finland; www.poyry.com) a contract for pre-engineering and preparatory work for mill infrastructure for a 1.5 million ton/yr bleached eucalyptus market pulp mill to be built in the state of…
A new gasification process moves a step closer to commercialization
Next year IHI Corp. (IHI; Tokyo, Japan; www.ihi.co.jp) plans to construct a demonstration plant in Indonesia that will gasify 50 ton/d of lignite (brown coal) into synthesis gas (syngas; predominantly hydrogen and carbon monoxide) using IHI’s twin-tower, bubbling fluidized-bed gasification process.…
Pilot plant to demonstrate advanced vapor-compression desalination nears completion
Researchers at Texas A&M University (College Station, Tex.; www.tamu.edu) are poised to complete assembly of a pilot project that seeks to demonstrate the commercial viability of advanced vapor-compression desalination, an updated version of a decades-old distillation technology first developed for…
A highly efficient microwave reactor continuously produces metallic nanoparticles
The process, developed by Masateru Nishioka at the Research Center for Compact Chemical Process, Institute of Advanced Science and Technology (AIST; Sendai; www.aist.go.jp) in collaboration with Shinko Kagaku (Koshigaya; www.shinkou-kagaku.co.jp), uses a microwave-assisted flow reactor developed by AIST and IDX…