Capital intensity is among the current constraints on industrial-scale fermentation, because the hardware for steam sterilization of bioreactors is complex and expensive. After recently emerging from stealth status, the startup company Biosphere (Oakland, Calif.; www.biosphere.io) has launched a new reactor…
Many separation processes depend on chemical or thermal principles, such as solvent extraction or distillation, but in some cases, mechanical methods can provide effective separations with lower cost and energy requirements. Eirex (Vaughan, Ont., Canada; www.eirex.ca) has developed a proprietary…
An ExxonMobil Corp. (Spring, Tex.; www.exxonmobil.com) adhesive-resin finishing facility in Baton Rouge, La. has become the first commercial process-manufacturing facility to be controlled by an open, standards-based process automation system. This is a departure from the closed, proprietary systems currently…
Thin gold films offer a broad range of benefits for electronics due to their high electrical conductivity and transparency. Current manufacturing methods are unable to achieve gold films thinner than 10 nm, and are also limited in the area and…
The wide range of performance properties of polyurethane foams makes them essential in many consumer goods. Thus, there is much effort going into creating a more environmentally friendly production process for polyurethane’s main building blocks, polyols and isocyanates. While much…
In December 2024, the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL; Richland, Wash.; www.pnnl.gov) announced a three-year collaborative project with vehicle-tire manufacturer Bridgestone (Tokyo, Japan; www.bridgestone.com) to scale up a thermocatalytic process for converting renewably derived ethanol to n-butene. Conventionally, n-butene is…
Developing sustainable pathways to ethylene — among the world’s most widely used chemicals — is a key element in decarbonizing the process industries. A new electrolysis technology developed by CERT Systems (Toronto, Ont., Canada; www.co2cert.com) can produce ethylene from CO2…
Desalination of seawater with reverse osmosis (RO) membranes is a key technology for addressing water scarcity issues around the globe, but seawater desalination is energy-intensive and the brine discharge can create coastal environmental problems. The company Flocean AS (Oslo, Norway;…
Nearly all ammonia is produced using methane via the Haber-Bosch process, which requires high-temperature and high-pressure operation. A new portable prototype device developed by researchers from Stanford University (Stanford, Calif.; www.stanford.edu) and King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals (Dhahran,…
Recycling materials, such as plastics and metals, is an attractive, but challenging path toward sustainable material manufacture. Now, researchers have made a discovery that may have far-reaching implications in material manufacture by positioning carbon nanotube (CNT) fibers as a sustainable…