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,…
A technology initially developed in Australia by OPEC Systems (Emu Plains, NSW, Australia; www.opecsystems.com) for separating and concentrating per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in a range of water applications has now been introduced in North America. The technology, known as…
Researchers at Argonne National Laboratory (Lemont, Ill.; www.anl.gov) are investigating an electrochemical separation process known as capacitive deionization (CDI; diagram) to extract and recover ions from liquid streams in wide-ranging applications, including battery recycling and biomanufacturing. CDI holds several advantages…
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…
A new category of electrolysis could significantly lower the expenses associated with producing “green” hydrogen. In the new capillary-fed electrolyzer cell — designed by Hysata (Wollongong, Australia; www.hysata.com) based on research from the University of Wollongong (www.uow.edu.au) — water is…
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…