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…
Solvay S.A. (Brussels, Belgium; www.solvay.com) has decided to increase the production capacity for peroxide-curable (PC) fluoroelastomers, commercialized under the trademark Tecnoflon, in the Solvay Solexis plant at Spinetta Marengo, Italy. Solvay is investing €10 million in the capacity increase, which is…
Codexis (Redwood City, Calif.; www.codexis.com) and CO2 Solution (Quebec City, Canada; www.co2solution.com) have jointly developed a cost-effective method for capturing carbon dioxide from coal-fired power plants. Solvent-based systems for capturing CO2 are relatively well-understood, but they have not been widely…
A magnetic composite based on reduced graphene oxide (RGO) has been developed by a Korean team with an exceptional capacity to remove arsenic from drinking water. The team, headed by professor Kwang S. Kim from the Center for Superfunctional Materials,…
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…