Atomic-layer deposition (ALD), a surface engineering technique that applies layers of coatings in a conformal way at single-atom thicknesses, is being investigated for its potential to improve the selectivity and durability of industrial catalysts under a U.S. Dept. of Energy…
Researchers at the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology (Empa; Dübendorf; www.empa.ch) and ETH Zurich (both Switzerland; www.ethz.ch) have made wood compressible and turned it into a piezoelectric generator. The research, reported last month in the journal Science…
Bühler AG (Uzwil, Switzerland; www.buhlergroup.com) is making a major step towards digitally connected rice mills of the future. The first rollout for integrated rice mills is entering the final stages, with the initial setup using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine…
As application demands evolve, battery materials have gotten more complex, incorporating not only lithium, but higher nickel, manganese and cobalt content, while also including various dopants like aluminum or zirconium and stabilizing coatings. Processing all of these disparate components into…
U.S. Vanadium LLC (Hot Springs, Ark.; www.usvanadium.com) has successfully demonstrated the ability to recycle the liquid electrolyte used in vanadium redox-flow batteries (VRFB), a rapidly growing commercial technology that promises to enable intermittent renewable energy technologies, such as solar and…
A closed-loop, long-duration energy-storage system (diagram) developed by Malta, Inc. (Cambridge, Mass.; www.maltainc.com) could provide a carbon-neutral path to industrial heating. “One of the exciting facets of this technology is that it generates a lot of discharge heat. When we…
Engineering design of a demonstration plant is underway for a process that pyrolyzes natural gas into hydrogen and solid carbon. The process was developed by C-Zero Inc. (Goleta, Calif.; www.czero.energy), a company set up in 2018 to develop and commercialize…
Many industrial processes involve phenol, but its toxic nature means that it must be effectively removed from waste streams prior to any subsequent biological treatment steps. Phenol can be removed via evaporation, but this method is quite energy-intensive. Alternatively, the…
Honeywell UOP (Des Plaines, Ill.; www.uop.com) has adapted its recycle-split-vapor (RSV) technology for natural-gas liquid (NGL) recovery into a new, modular offering, RSV2, which enables quick retrofitting of existing gas-processing plants with minimal downtime. “The RSV2 technology can increase ethane…
Solvay S.A. (Brussels, Belgium; www.solvay.com) recently announced a new commercial process for synthetic eugenol (diagram), a derivative of phenol, whose natural version is extracted from clove oil obtained from dried flower buds of clove trees grown in Indonesia and Madagascar.…