Solvay S.A. (Brussels, Belgium; www.solvay.com) says it will invest over €5 million in the construction of a test fuel cell with a total electric power of 1 MW at the SolVin plant in Lillo, Antwerp, Belgium. The investment is part of…
The global engineering and construction company M+W Group (formerly M+W Zander; Stuttgart, Germany; www.mwgroup.net) strengthens its business in the U.S. and in Canada. Today, the company announced that its subsidiary, M+W Americas, Inc. purchased 100% of Global Automation Partners (GAP;…
The gas-to-liquids (GTL) process offers a promising option for producing valuable liquid fuels from gas resources that would otherwise be wasted. These include associated gas (the gas produced along with oil, which is now frequently disposed of by flaring or…
To address the needs for the fast-growing photovoltaic (PV) market, DuPont (Wilmington, Del.; www.dupont.com) opened the Meyrin Photovoltaic Application Laboratory at its European Technical Center – adding new capabilities to this leading R&D hub by developing next-generation products. Over 50…
Pöyry Plc. (Helsinki; www.poyry.com) has been awarded an engineering contract by SAICA Containerboard UK Ltd. for one of the world’s most advanced recycled paper mills to be built at Partington Wharfside, near Manchester, U.K. The value of Pöyry’s assignment is…
Brain AG (Zwingenberg; www.brain-biotech.de) Bayer Schering Pharma AG (Bergkamen, both Germany; www.bayerscheringpharma.de) are cooperating in the field of production process optimization of steroid compounds. The goal of the collaboration is the energy-efficient and thus sustainable fermentative production of steroid compounds…
A recently commercialized method for growing single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNs) in large quantities enables their use in a downstream process for depositing semiconducting inks onto flexible surfaces. Southwest NanoTechnologies Inc. (Norman, Okla.; www.swentnano.com) has developed a scalable technique (CoMoCAT process)…
Professor Shigeru Yamago and colleagues at the Institute for Chemical Research, Kyoto University (Japan; www.scl.kyoto-u.ac.jp/~yasuyuki/) have synthesized [8]cycloparaphenylene for the first time. The 11-nm-dia. molecule consists of eight benzene molecules linked together in a closed chain. The compound has a…
A patented (WO 2008/053174), fluidic-oscillator-driven device that generates microbubbles has been shown by researchers from the University of Sheffield (U.K.; www.shef.ac.uk/cpe), in collaboration with the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic (Prague; www.cas.cz/en), to improve the performance of air-lift…
In Malaysia, about 2-million metric tons (m.t.) of rice husk are produced each year, and the rice husk is either burned or disposed of as waste. Now this waste may find application as a non-leachable building material thanks to a…