A new recycling process claims to significantly reduce the complexity of recovering graphite from spent lithium-ion battery (LIB) materials by leaching out impurities rather than leaching out metal. By extracting impurities and recovering high-grade graphite, the Hydro-to-Anode technology, developed by…
A mixed-salt process (MSP) designed to reduce the costs and increase the energy efficiency of removing carbon dioxide from post-combustion fluegas is advancing in two related projects. In the first, a 10-MW engineering-scale demonstration plant for the MSP is under…
A new catalytic recycling method that avoids harsh processing conditions could widely expand the recyclability of a broad range of plastics, including polycarbonates, polyesters and mixed-waste feeds. Researchers from the Center for Sustainable and Circular Technologies (CSCT; www.ccst.ac.uk) at the…
Utilizing rare-earth elements (REEs), such as for permanent magnets in renewable energy applications, requires costly chemical separations that generate large volumes of waste. A process featuring new diglycolamide (DGA)-based ligands and liquid-liquid extraction exhibits more effective separation of individual REEs,…
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…
As the cost of renewable energy decreases, many organizations are looking to electrify their operations to reduce carbon emissions. One promising area for decarbonization is industrial heating, which accounts for a large fraction of global emissions. However, heating networks in…
2D polymer Chemical engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT; Cambridge; www.mit.edu) have synthesized two-dimensional sheets of polyaramide. The achievement, described in a February issue of Nature, is said to be the first time a polymer has been grown…