Last month, Vale S.A. (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; www.vale.com) began construction on the first commercial plant to use its Tecnored process, which produces pig iron with biomass instead of metallurgical coal (coke). Located in Marabá, in the southeast of Pará,…
To ensure product safety and quality, products containing lactose (at dairy plants, for example) are processed under hygienic conditions. These strict hygiene conditions require frequent cleaning of pneumatic transport systems — typically every eight weeks. This procedure is both labor-intensive…
Designing a storage vessel for your plant requires a methodical approach. This article outlines six steps to follow in designing, installing and starting up a storage vessel that successfully handles your bulk material under your operating conditions. Have you experienced…
BASF SE (Ludwigshafen) and thyssenkrupp Uhde GmbH (Dortmund, both Germany) achieved measurable improvements in the STAR process, a proprietary dehydrogenation process from thyssenkrupp Uhde that can produce propylene from propane feedstocks, or iso-butylene from iso-butane feedstocks. The technology has been…
Air Products (Lehigh Valley, Pa.) has awarded thyssenkrupp nucera AG & Co. KGaA (Dortmund, Germany) the supply of its alkaline water electrolysis technology for a 10 metric ton per day facility to produce green liquid hydrogen in Casa Grande, Arizona.…
SSAB (Stockholm, Sweden), LKAB (Luleå, Sweden) and Vattenfall (Solna, Sweden) are joining together in a demonstration project called HYBRIT, to replace coal-based blast furnaces with direct hydrogen-based reduction technology. The HYBRIT initiative aims to demonstrate a complete industrial value chain…
A pilot facility currently under construction in Charleston, W.Va. will produce renewable acrylonitrile (ACN) without requiring the traditional petroleum-based propylene as feedstock. Since ACN is the raw material used to make carbon fibers, the new route to ACN allows the…
A pilot plant is scheduled to be completed later this year for the production of graphene using a technology known as flash Joule heating (FJH). Developed in the laboratory of James Tour at Rice University (Houston; www.rice.edu), FJH involves forcing…
A process that produces methanol from the gases generated at a steel mill will soon be field tested. The process has been under development for the last five years by researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Environmental, Safety and Energy…
Enzymes in a Cage Researchers at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT; Germany; www.kit.edu) have embedded enzymes into metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), and demonstrated for the first time that stabilization by these frameworks is sufficient for use of the enzymes in…