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Separation Processes

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Chementator: A promising nanosieve for dehydrating solvents and biofuels  

Although nanoporous silica membranes are promising systems for the molecular separation of gases and liquids, they lack microstructural stability in the presence of water at temperatures as low as 60°C. Prolonged exposure to water causes hydrolysis, resulting in the formation…

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Chementator: New ceramic-membrane system doubles rate and slashes cost for dehydrating ethanol  

Hitachi Zosen Corp. (Hitz; Tokyo, Japan; edlinks.chemengonline.com/7369-531) is commercializing a new membrane for a hybrid-distillation system (HDS) that is especially suitable for dehydrating ethanol and isopropanol. The HDS can produce 99.7 vol.% ethanol from ethanol-water mixtures with 10 vol.% H2O…

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Facts at Your Fingertips: Sedimentation Centrifuging

Centrifugation is the method of choice in the chemical process industries (CPI) for separating solids from liquids. It relies on the G-forces generated by high-speed rotation to recover solids or liquids from slurries, as well as clarify liquids or classify…

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Chementator: Purification of Single-walled Nanotubes Using Froth Flotation  

A method for the purification of single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWNTs) in four sequential steps — oxidative pretreatment, acid treatment, silica dissolution, and froth flotation — has been proposed by a team from the Petroleum and Petrochemical College, Chulalongkorn University (Bangkok,…

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Chementator: Membrane Cuts the Cost of Ethanol Dehydration

Ethanol production is an energy-intensive process in which about 50% of the cost is for distillation and dehydration of the ethanol. A membrane system that does the same job, but reduces the energy consumption by up to 50%, has been…

Slash downstream processing costs for producing biologicals with this new chromatography technology

Last month at the BioProcess International Conference (Boston, Mass.; October 1–3), Novasep Process (Boothwyn, Pa.; edlinks.chemengonline.com/6901-533) launched a new technology for downstream processing of biologicals. BioSC (Biopharmaceutical Sequential Chromatography) uses a process known as sequential multi-column continuous chromatography (SMCC), which…

Fabric filters

The world’s power plants, industrial companies and mines will spend $6.1 billion in 2007 for fabric filter equipment, systems and elements to clean up stack gases, according to a report by McIlvaine Co. (Northfield, Ill.; edlinks.chemengonline.com/6900-546). Further, revenues for the…

O2-permeable ceramic

Hollow-fiber membrane tubes that are selectively permeable to oxygen have been constructed by researchers from the School of Chemical Engineering and Advanced Materials at Newcastle University (edlinks.chemengonline.com/6899-542), in collaboration with the Chemical Engineering Dept. at Imperial College London (both U.K.).…

Supercritical water cracks residue oil

Mitsubishi Materials Corp. (edlinks.chemengonline.com/6899-535), with the project support of Petroleum Energy Center, Japan, (both Tokyo), has developed a new thermal process that uses supercritical (SC) water to crack vacuum distillation residue oil (VR) into clean, lighter oil with a high…

Slash energy consumption with this new crossflow filtration process

Crossflow (CF) filtration is widely used for separating substances with poor filtration properties. As the method’s name implies, a crossflow of the feed continuously flows across the filter membrane in order to wash away material accumulations that clog the membrane…