This system, which has multiple reactors and uses microwaves for heating, has been developed by professor Yuji Wada at the Graduate School of Science and Engineering, Tokyo Institute of Technology (edlinks.chemengonline.com/6898-543), in cooperation with Shikoku Instrument Co. (Takamatsu; edlinks.chemengonline.com/6898-544) and…
Last month, Hexion Specialty Chemicals, Inc. (Columbus, Ohio; edlinks.chemengonline.com/6898-546) signed a definitive agreement to acquire Huntsman Corp. (Salt Lake City, Utah) in an all-cash transaction valued at approximately $10.6 billion, including the assumption of debt. Huntsman has terminated its previous…
Dow Chemical Co. (Midland, Mich.; edlinks.chemengonline.com/6898-548) and Crystalsev (São Paulo, Brazil; edlinks.chemengonline.com/6898-549) are forming a joint venture in Brazil to design and build the first integrated facility of its scale in the world for making polyethylene (PE) from sugar cane.…
At the end of June, Wuxi NutriRice Co. Ltd. — a joint venture of DSM (Sittard, Netherlands; edlinks.chemengonline.com/6898-550) and Bühler AG (Uzwil, Switzerland; edlinks.chemengonline.com/6898-551) — opened the world’s first facility for producing nutritionally enriched rice. Production at the site will…
Wacker Chemie AG (Munich, Germany; edlinks.chemengonline.com/6898-552) plans to build the first commercial-scale plant for the production of granular polysilicon for the solar industry at its Berghausen, Germany, site. The 650-m.t./yr facility is expected to start up by the end of…
Lonza (Basel, Switzerland; edlinks.chemengonline.com/6898-553) has commercialized an online monitoring system, called PyroSense, for the automatic detection of endotoxins in water systems. The PyroSense system provides automatic, quantitative determination of endotoxin in water at selected intervals, using a standard assay system…
Solvay Solexis, a subsidiary of Solvay S.A. (Brussels, Belgium; edlinks.chemengonline.com/6898-554), and Thin Film Electronics ASA (Oslo, Norway) are cooperating to develop materials for the production of printed electronics devices.The aim of the joint-development program is to optimize ferroelectric-polymer materials to…
Gone are the days of one-size-fits-all engineering software packages. Today, solution providers offer versions with improved integration for advanced data sharing and simplified user interfaces with the ability to multitask between the design house and the plant floor,…
In the chemical process industries (CPI), pressure is constantly on to improve filtration. The filtration step has to be performed quickly (time is money), efficiently (product loss is money lost), and effectively (energy costs for pumping and drying…
For the 12th straight year, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has recognized efforts in developing less-toxic alternatives to existing technologies and reducing or eliminating waste in the manufacturing process. The 2007 Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge Awards, which are described…