Aluminum alloy 7075 has excellent mechanical properties, including high strength for lightweighting applications, but its production process is energy intensive, which raises costs and limits its use. Now, scientists at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL; Richland, Wash.; www.pnnl.gov) have developed…
A next-generation ethane-feed steam cracker designed by Lummus Technology (Houston; www.lummus.com) has the ability to achieve zero carbon dioxide emissions in the production of ethylene. The zero-CO2 design utilizes Lummus SRT pyrolysis furnaces and a state-of-the-art product-recovery system. Lummus improved…
Proton ceramic cells that couple endothermic steam reforming with heat from electrochemical gas separation and compression have been scaled up. These cells, developed by CoorsTek Membrane Sciences AS (Oslo; www.coorstek.com), the University of Oslo (both Norway; www.uio.no) and the Institute…
In an advancement toward circularity for commodity plastics, researchers at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL; Oak Ridge, Tenn.; www.ornl.gov) have developed a method for upcycling the commodity thermoplastic acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) into an ABS-vitrimer material that can be…
Currently, enhanced biological phosphorus removal (EBPR) techniques in municipal wastewater-treatment plants (WWTPs) do not work well at temperatures above 25°C, which is common in warm countries. This limitation is expected to extend to more countries with the advent of global…
An interdisciplinary team of biologists, chemists and engineers from the University of Portsmouth (U.K.; www.port.ac.uk) have become the first to successfully grow a limpet-inspired biomaterial with extreme strength. The common limpet (Patella vulgata) is a small, snail-like mollusk with a…
Cyclopropane-functionalized hydrocarbons can be excellent fuels because of their high energy densities, but organic synthesis of such fuels is difficult. In work recently published in the journal Joule, a research team led by Jay Keasling at the Joint Bioenergy Institute…
Conventional gas-separation membranes normally exhibit a trade-off between selectivity and permeability — a practical limitation referred to as the Robeson upper bound. As a result, membranes designed to selectively remove relatively low concentrations of carbon dioxide from natural gas or…
A new class of adhesives being developed by the startup gluECO Adhesives LLC (Ashburnham, Mass.; www.glueco-adhesives.com) is based on corn proteins and has a host of environmentally friendly properties, such as biodegradability and the ability to be easily removed in…
Biomethane Last month, NextChem, a subsidiary of Maire Tecnimont S.p.A. (Rome, Italy; www.mairetecnimont.com) was awarded a contract by ENGIE subsidiary Storengy (Bois-Colombes Cedex, France; www.storengy.com) to perform an advanced basic-engineering study for a plant that will produce second-generation biomethane from…