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Plant Watch: Business News for August 2018

Plant Watch BASF to expand global antioxidant production capacities July 10, 2018 — BASF SE (Ludwigshafen, Germany; www.basf.com) plans to increase the global production capacity for its antioxidant Irganox 1010 by 40% with production expansion projects at its sites in…

A Closer Look at Pressure Relief

Understanding how to size and select pressure-relief devices is key to ensuring the safety of your facility Pressure-relief and pressure-regulating devices serve the critical purpose of protecting facilities, people and equipment from potentially harmful, even catastrophic overpressure situations. For this…

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Advanced water electrolysis launched

Last month, thyssenkrupp Industrial Solutions AG (Dortmund, Germany; www.thyssenkrupp-industrial-solutions.com) launched industrial-scale water electrolysis systems that make large-scale hydrogen production from renewable electricity economically attractive. The advanced water electrolyzer (diagram) features a well-proven cell design paired with an especially large (2.7…

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An inexpensive, renewable aerogel shows promise for handling oil spills

Many methods have been developed to remove spilled oil and organic pollutants from water, but they all entail shortcomings, such as low absorption ability and poor buoyancy. Now, a team from the School of Light Industry and Chemical Engineering, Dalian…

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Testing the limits of cryogenic distillation

CSIRO (Perth, Australia; www.csiro.au) and the University of Western Australia (www.uwa.edu.au) have developed a first-of-its-kind pilot plant for high-pressure cryogenic distillation processes. “Although cryogenic distillation is practiced in industry and there are some models that can be applied to cryogenic…

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Extracting lithium from waste brine without ponds

The growing demand for lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) has created incentives to improve processes for extracting lithium from brine. Current Li-extraction processes involve pumping brine from underground into shallow pools for evaporation and concentration. But the traditional method has several significant…

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More scalable method for membrane separations

Membranes present a lower-energy alternative to distillation for the separation of hydrocarbons, but these processes are often limited by prohibitively expensive materials or intricate fabrication steps. Now, a team of researchers from Texas A&M University (TAMU; College Station, Tex.; www.tamu.edu)…

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The first commercial power-to-liquids plant planned

Nordic Blue Crude A/S (NBC; Porsgrunn, Norway; www.nordicbluecrude.no) intends to build the first power-to-liquids (PtL) plant in the Norwegian industrial park of Heroya, located 140 km southeast of Oslo. Although the date for the startup has not yet been released,…

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Fast-pyrolysis process recovers valuable materials from tires

Each year, more than 1 billion automobile tires are replaced worldwide. Together, the used tires contain 4.4 million metric tons of valuable products, such as carbon black, metals, fuels and chemicals. In an effort to recover these materials, the University…

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Making amine-based CO2 adsorbents more stable

Amine-containing solids have been investigated as promising adsorbents for CO2 capture, but existing amine-containing adsorbents degrade by oxidation, making them unreliable for repeated CO2 adsorption-desorption cycles over a long period. The low stability requires the continuous addition of fresh adsorbents,…