Bechtel (Reston, Va.) announced the sustained pilot operations of its proprietary Low Energy Ejector Desalination System (LEEDS) – a new process solution that creates a valuable new supply of water for customers and communities, which in turn reduces stress on…
The following questions and answers come from a conversation between Chemical Engineering magazine and Tathagata Basu, General Manager – Refining and Petrochemical at Honeywell Process Solutions (Houston, Texas; process.honeywell.com). The discussion revolves around the use of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies…
A new electrochemical technology for direct-air capture (DAC) of atmospheric CO2 can also produce freshwater from brackish water or brine waste from desalination or wastewater treatment facilities (diagram). The technology, developed by Capture6 (Berkeley, Calif.; www.capture6.org), splits the salt content…
Researchers of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT; Germany; www.kit.edu) and the SMS group GmbH (Düsseldorf, Germany; www.sms-group.com) have developed a new process to reduce CO2 emissions from worldwide steel production by several hundred million tons per year. It is based…
A new pilot plant is demonstrating a proprietary technology for recycling magnet materials from end-of-life (EOL) products, such as electric motors, automobile parts and hard-disk drives. Developed by Cyclic Materials Inc. (Toronto, Ont., Canada; www.cyclicmaterials.earth), the Mag-Xtract process is said…
Composites of copper and graphene have been explored as a way to improve electrical conductivity, but researchers have not been successful at enhancing conductivity with a corresponding reduction in the temperature coefficient of resistance (TCR), and have not been able…
CO2 TO METHANOL Last December, Sumitomo Chemical Co, Ltd. (Tokyo, Japan; www.sumitomo-chem.co.jp) started operating a pilot facility for producing methanol from CO2 at its Ehime Works, located in Niihama City, Ehime Prefecture, Japan. The company aims to complete the demonstration…
A new electrocatalytic technology (diagram) is said to be the first to produce methanol from CO2 at ambient temperature and pressure in a commercially viable reactor design. Oxylus Energy (New Haven, Conn.; www.oxylusenergy.com) recently unveiled a 5-cm2 electrolysis cell to…
Click chemistry — the subject of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Chemistry — is a powerful and efficient method for rapidly connecting chemical fragments. One highly versatile type of click chemistry involves the so-called SuFEx [sulfur(VI) fluoride exchange] reaction, which…
Researchers at Asahi Kasei Corp. (Düsseldorf, Germany and Tokyo, Japan; www.asahi-kasei.com) are developing a membrane-based system that dehydrates organic solvents without heat or pressure. The system is targeting pharmaceutical-manufacturing applications, where organic solvents are commonly used in performing reactions, as…