Isolation and purification of pure, active enantiomers is important in the development of active pharmaceutical ingredients and drug products. However, recovering the desired optical isomer from a racemic mixture means half of the chemical produced — the undesired isomer — will be wasted, unless it can be recycled in some manner. Now, researchers from the Tokyo University of Science have developed a system that, at least for one important class of compounds — chiral sulfoxides — is able to produce the desired isomer with high efficiency. MORE

A new material could open the door to more effective protonic ceramic fuel cells (PCFCs). PCFCs are a promising energy source that employ specialized ceramic materials to conduct protons (instead of electrons) at much lower temperatures than typical solid-oxide fuel cells. However, currently, there are few known materials with adequate proton conductance. Discovered by researchers at Tokyo Institute of Technology, and reported in Communications Materials, Ba2LuAlO5 is a “hexagonal perovskite-related oxide” that exhibits notable characteristics for proton conduction at temperatures as low as 232°C. MORE

In May, Li-Metal Corp. announced the production of refined lithium metal from lithium carbonate salt using a new electrolysis process at the company’s pilot facility in Ontario, Canada. The lithium metal produced at the pilot plant is primarily intended for use in the anodes of next-generation batteries, which aim for greater energy density (increasing from 250–280 W-h/kg in current batteries to 350–400 W-h/kg and beyond for future batteries).  MORE

Eneos Materials and Yokogawa recently reached an agreement to officially adopt Yokogawa’s autonomous-control artificial intelligence (AI) technology for use at an Eneos Materials chemical plant. The agreement follows field trials of Factorial Kernel Dynamic Policy Programming (FKDPP), a reinforcement learning-based AI algorithm jointly developed by Yokogawa and the Nara Institute of Science and Technology, which is said to have demonstrated a high level of performance while controlling a distillation column at the Eneos Materials plant. MORE

Last May, Emerson was selected by Syzygy Plasmonics to automate its all-electric photocatalytic reactor technology. Syzygy has developed, scaled and integrated its core technologies, incubated at, and licensed from, Rice University, into a universal photocatalytic reactor platform (photo), which includes the Rigel photoreactor and the proprietary photocatalyst that enables light-driven chemical reactions at unprecedented efficiency. MORE

Infinium recently announced that it has manufactured ton-level quantities of a proprietary catalyst that is integral in the company’s process for making liquid fuels from waste CO2 and hydrogen derived from renewable power. Infinium plans to manufacture commercial volumes of CO2-derived diesel, aviation fuel and naphtha — known as electrofuels (e-fuels) — starting at the end of 2023. The catalyst is a key technology for the first stage of the synthetic fuels process in which waste CO2 from an industrial point source.  MORE

Earlier this year, Salinity Solutions Ltd. signed an agreement with Te-Tech Process Solutions to manufacture commercial water-purification systems based on batch reverse-osmosis (RO). This technology, originally characterized and developed at the University of Birmingham and commercialized by spin-off company Salinity Solutions, is said to use 50% less energy and generate 80% less waste than conventional RO, while purifying up to 98% of the water.  MORE