Conventional propane dehydrogenation (PDH) is an endothermic, equilibrium-limited reaction that requires high temperatures to achieve commercially viable per-pass yields of propylene. Oxidative propane dehydrogenation has the potential to form propylene at much lower temperatures and more selectively by controlling the…
Plant Watch Chevron and Honeywell start up alkylation unit using new ionic-liquids technology April 13, 2021 — Chevron Corp. (San Ramon, Calif.; www.chevron.com) and Honeywell International, Inc. (Charlotte, N.C.; www.honeywell.com) announced the commissioning and startup of the world’s first commercial-scale…
After a rough past year, petroleum refineries are seeking profit opportunities through the use of renewable feedstocks, such as vegetable oils and waste fats, as well as with new alkylation technologies and by increasing “crude-to-chemicals” (C2C) approaches The past 18…
Researchers at the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology (Empa; Dübendorf; www.empa.ch) and ETH Zurich (both Switzerland; www.ethz.ch) have made wood compressible and turned it into a piezoelectric generator. The research, reported last month in the journal Science…
Bühler AG (Uzwil, Switzerland; www.buhlergroup.com) is making a major step towards digitally connected rice mills of the future. The first rollout for integrated rice mills is entering the final stages, with the initial setup using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine…
As application demands evolve, battery materials have gotten more complex, incorporating not only lithium, but higher nickel, manganese and cobalt content, while also including various dopants like aluminum or zirconium and stabilizing coatings. Processing all of these disparate components into…
U.S. Vanadium LLC (Hot Springs, Ark.; www.usvanadium.com) has successfully demonstrated the ability to recycle the liquid electrolyte used in vanadium redox-flow batteries (VRFB), a rapidly growing commercial technology that promises to enable intermittent renewable energy technologies, such as solar and…
A closed-loop, long-duration energy-storage system (diagram) developed by Malta, Inc. (Cambridge, Mass.; www.maltainc.com) could provide a carbon-neutral path to industrial heating. “One of the exciting facets of this technology is that it generates a lot of discharge heat. When we…
Plant Watch Thermo Fisher Scientific plans $600-million bioprocessing expansion March 12, 2021 — Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc. (Waltham, Mass.; www.thermofisher.com) plans to invest more than $600 million in capital investments to expand its bioprocessing production capabilities through 2022. These investments…
Engineering design of a demonstration plant is underway for a process that pyrolyzes natural gas into hydrogen and solid carbon. The process was developed by C-Zero Inc. (Goleta, Calif.; www.czero.energy), a company set up in 2018 to develop and commercialize…