Recycling sachets Later this year, Unilever (London, U.K.; www.unilever.com) plans to open a pilot plant in Indonesia to test the long-term viability of its new technology for recycling plastic sachet (small bags) waste. The process, called CreaSolv, has been developed…
Plant Watch Ineos announces plans to build new PDH plant, increase ethylene capacity June 12, 2017 — Ineos (Rolle, Switzerland; www.ineos.com) announced plans to construct a propane dehydrogenation (PDH) unit in Europe. The plant will produce 750,000 metric tons per…
Membrane distillation (MD) — a thermal desalination technique used for recovering pure water from concentrated salt solutions — is hampered by high energy consumption, low single-pass recovery rates and by the need to use expensive heat exchangers to handle the…
Recovery of the essential plant nutrient phosphorus from wastewater can be an effective way to reduce runoff into waterways while avoiding the need to obtain the element from mined minerals. While phosphorus recovery from wastewater effluent performs well, it is…
An overview of how the chemical process industries are looking to the IIoT to help form new business models in a competitive environment Today, technological advances are being made and implemented at an accelerated pace that is quickly changing the…
Nippon Paper Industries Co. (NPI; Tokyo, Japan; www.nipponpapergroup.com) has installed the world’s largest facility of its kind for the commercial production of cellulose nanofiber (CNF). Located at its Ishinomaki Works in Miyagi Prefecture, the $16-million investment has a production capacity…
Predictive process models enable more efficient operations and higher-value products When they hear the words “process modeling,” some may envision an engineer sitting in front of a laptop waiting for a distillation column flowsheet to converge. While flowsheet simulations are…
The first pre-commercial demonstration has started for a system that can provide steam for industrial process heat using solar energy at prices lower than using natural gas. The technology uses solar thermal collectors to generate hot water, air or steam…
New motors and drives provide energy efficiency and reliability in chemical applications Always on the lookout for ways to reduce downtime and energy costs, chemical processors are turning to advanced motors and drives to help achieve these goals. Sometimes as…
Researchers from the University of Wollongong (Australia; www.uow.edu.au), led by professor Gordon Wallace and Caiyun Wang, built a battery with electrodes and a solid electrolyte out of silk. Previous attempts at making such biodegradable, dissolvable batteries used natural, biocompatible materials…