In The News
Membrane bioreactors improve the production of lignocellulosic-ethanol
Membrane bioreactors (MBRs) are widely used in wastewater treatment plants because they intensify the biotreatment process, reduce the number of processing stages, retain the biocatalyst and help remove the product from the suspended solids. In order to take advantage of…
Chementator Briefs
Sludge to fuel Bio-sludge is a byproduct of the wastewater treatment process at Stora Enso Oy’s (Helsinki, Finland; www.storaenso.com) Heinola fluting mill in Finland. In the past, the mill had been burning the bio-sludge at the power station for generating…
Bottom-up synthesis of new perovskite material for ammonia production
Perovskites are a class of synthetic materials that have a crystalline structure similar to that of the naturally occurring mineral calcium titanate. They have been the subject of many studies because they exhibit unique properties that can be tuned according…
Metals from nodules on seabed offer environmental advantages
Small-scale pilot testing has begun for a process that extracts nickel, manganese, cobalt and copper from nodules collected from the surface of the Pacific Ocean seafloor. Obtaining the metals from the seabed nodules has advantages over mining land-based ores because…
New material promises to enhance performance of gas-separation membranes
Harnessing its polymer technology and carbon-fiber expertise has enabled Toray Industries, Inc. (Tokyo, Japan; www.toray.com) to create a porous carbon fiber with uniformly continuous pores (diagram) — claimed to be a world’s first. Using this fiber as a support layer…
A Pt-free electrode promises to cut costs for fuel cells and metal-air batteries
Hiroya Abe and colleagues at Tohoku University (Sendai, www.tohoku.ac.jp) and Hokkaido University have developed a method to fabricate a highly active catalyst electrode for performing the oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) in fuel cells and metal-air batteries. Currently, such fuel cells…
Non-halogenated flame-retardant material
Dynamic Modifiers LLC (Atlanta, Ga.; www.dynamicmodifiers.com), a maker of custom polyolefin compounds, recently introduced PAL…VersaCHAR, a non-halogenated flame-retardant polymer designed to be molded over other materials. When exposed to flame, the formulation’s surface chars quickly, which prevents flame spread and…
Particle Size Matters
With the right technology, chemical processors can obtain precise particle size and consistent material while improving throughput and quality Particle sizing is an essential task in the chemical process industries (CPI) where achieving high-quality product efficiently and at a low…
Cascade reactions on ‘nanozymes’ make chemicals from CO2
An international team of researchers has developed metallic nanoparticles that imitate enzymes to convert carbon dioxide into ethanol and propanol, which are common raw materials for the chemical industry. The team includes professors Justin Gooding and Richard Tilley from the…
Gas Fermentation Leads Honored Achievements
The winning technology for the 2019 Kirkpatrick Chemical Engineering Achievement Award, along with the other finalist technologies, demonstrate how innovative engineering can tackle climate change and other challenges. All six technologies are described here The six finalist technologies for the…