Uhde Inventa-Fischer (Domat/Ems, Switzerland, and Berlin, Germany; www.uhde-inventa-fischer.com) and Hangzhou Hangding Nylon Tech. Co., Ltd., a company under Sanding Holding Group, Zhejiang Province, P.R. China, signed a contract for the delivery of a PA-6 polymerization plant to produce textile grade…
An enhanced reactor technology that boosts the speed of producing bioethanol by a factor of four while decreasing production costs by 25% compared to a stirred batch fermenter has been developed by IHI Corp. (IHI; Tokyo; www.ihi.co.jp). The technology features…
Dow Corning considers biomass plant to produce steam and electricity August 20, 2010 — Dow Corning’s (Midland, Mich.; www.dowcorning.com) Midland manufacturing site is considering the installation of a biomass-powered energy facility to provide a renewable, reliable and cost-effective supply of…
Professor Kazuaki Ishihara and colleagues at Nagoya University (Nagoya, Japan;www.nubio.nagoya-u.ac.jp/indexe.HTM) has discovered an efficient, chiral, salt-based hypervalent iodine catalyst that could replace toxic metal catalysts without generating the waste or explosion risks associated with hypervalent organo-iodine complexes. The researchers took…
Photovoltaic cells typically operate at 20% efficiency in converting solar energy to electricity. A new system that could boost the efficiency to as much as 60% by combining the light and heat of solar radiation is being developed at Stanford…
ABB (Houston; www.abb.com) has announced that its local company in Oman, ABB Oman LLC has signed a three-year maintenance agreement for Vale’s (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; www.vale.com) state-of-the-art iron-ore pellet plant and distribution center in Oman. This maintenance partnership agreement…
A metal membrane system developed by Eltron Research and Development (Boulder, Colo., www.eltronresearch.com) separates hydrogen from mixed-gas feed streams that result from gasification, steam reforming and petrochemical processes. Based on a proprietary, dense metal alloy with hydrogen permeability that is…
Solar Semi Engineering Ltd. (SSE; U.K.; www.solsemi.com) , a solar and semiconductor start-up company, today purchased the business and assets of Edwards Chemical Management Europe Limited (CME; Newhaven, U.K.) for an undisclosed sum. CME is part of Edwards (Crawley, U.K.; www.edwardsvacuum.com),…
Roughly 80% of the heavy oil in Alberta’s oil sands is too deep for open-pit mining, the most common production method at present. Consequently, this oil will have to be recovered by in situ methods, such as steam-assisted gravity drainage…
KBR Inc. (Houston; www.kbr.com) today announced the start-up of a 1.35-million metric tons per year (m.t./yr) steam cracker at Saudi Kayan Petrochemical Co.’s (Saudi Kayan) olefins plant located in Saudi Kayan’s Petrochemical Complex at Al-Jubail, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. KBR executed…