In The News
Cobalt and Rhodia to build biobutanol demonstration plant in Brazil
Cobalt Technologies (Cobalt; Mountain View, Calif.; www.cobalttech.com) and Rhodia, a member of the Solvay Group (Brussels, Belgium; www.solvay.com), today announced they will begin joint development and operation of a biobutanol demonstration facility in Brazil. This is one more step by…
UOP technology selected by Lukoil
UOP LLC (Des Plaines, Ill. www.uop.com), a Honeywell company, has been selected by Russia’s Lukoil to provide technology to produce blending components used to make high-octane gasoline and petrochemicals at its facility in Nizhny Novgorod, Russia. Lukoil will license an…
BASF plans to expand vinylformamide capacity in Ludwigshafen and more business news
Plant Watch BASF plans to expand vinylformamide capacity in Ludwigshafen and... July 5, 2012 — BASF SE (Ludwigshafen, Germany; www.basf.com) is planning to expand the manufacturing plant for vinylformamide (VFA) in Ludwigshafen. In addition, it intends to increase the polymerization…
A self-healing dynamic membrane
French researchers from the Institut Européen des Membranes (CNRS/ENSCM, Université Montpiellier; www.iemm.univ-mont2.fr) and the Institut de Chimie Radicalaire (CNRS, Aix-Marseille Université) have developed what is claimed to be the first dynamic membrane for water filtration that not only can adjust…
Methane recovery from a trona mine
Last month, Solvay Group (Brussels, Belgium; www.solvay.com) unveiled a methane recovery system (the MaRS Project) that captures methane liberated by mining trona ore (trisodium hydrogendicarbonate dihydrate), and pipes the gas to nearby processing facilities as a fuel for process heating.…
Scaleup of a CTL process with carbon capture
The Yankuang Group (Zoucheng City, Shandong Province; www.ykjt.cn), one of China’s largest coal companies, and Accelergy Corp. (Houston; www.accelergy.com), are jointly developing a large-scale, low-carbon, coal-to-liquids (CTL) plant incorporating both direct and indirect liquefaction, in Erdos in China’s Inner Mongolia…
Coke oven offgases may help to increase steel production
Two dissimilar iron-making methods — a conventional blast furnace using coke from coal, and gas-based direct reduction of iron ore — are combined in a process being developed by Midrex Technologies, Inc. (Charlotte, N.C.; www.midrex.com) and Praxair Inc. (Danbury, Conn.;…
This valve tolerates up to 80% differential pressure
Differential pressure can be a tough problem for butterfly valves, in that it can cause damaging cavitation. As a rule of thumb, for instance, a typical butterfly valve can only handle a maximum of 30% differential pressure (DP), explains René…
The mass production of organic-modified metal oxide nanoparticles
A system that continuously produces 10 ton/yr of nanoparticles has been developed by Tadafumi Adschiri, principal investigator at the Advanced Institute for Materials Research (AIMR) and professor at the Institute of Multidisciplinary Research for Advanced Materials and New Industry Hatchery…
A more-efficient Fischer-Tropsch reactor
The production rate (per amount of catalyst) for generating liquid hydrocarbons from syngas by the Fischer-Tropsch (F-T) process, using a slurry reactor or tubular reactor, is generally limited to about 30% of the maximum rate. The restraining factor is heat…