Last month, Cargill (Minneapolis, Min.; www.cargill.com) broke ground in Chicago on a $22-million manufacturing plant for producing BiOH polyols. Scheduled for startup in November, the facility will be the first world-scale biobased polyols plant; since BiOH polyols were commercialized in…
A process that makes glass by "zapping" the raw materials with a plasma as they fly through the air is being developed by Japanese researchers in a new project led by NEDO (New Energy & Industrial Technology Development Organization; Kawasaki,…
Engineers at MIT (Cambridge, Mass.; www.mit.edu) are developing solar concentrators that have the potential to increase the electrical power output from solar cells by a factor of more than 40. Instead of actually focusing the light, as in systems being…
Plant Watch Metso to supply mining equipment to Anglo American-MMX in Brazil July 1, 2008 — Metso Minerals will supply crushing, screening and feeding equipment to Anglo American-MMX for its Minas Rio Project located in the Minas Gerais state in…
Optoacoustic gas detection determines gas content via the measurement of acoustic pressure waves that are propagated as a gas is irradiated under an appropriately tuned light. A gaseous-mixture sample passes through a membrane into a measurement cell, which contains an…
The production of hydrogen by water splitting promises to become less expensive through a solar-energy process being developed at Penn State University (University Park, Pa.; www.psu.edu). Like other photoelectrochemical methods, the process splits water into its two components, generating O2…
Among this year’s award winners of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA; Washington, D.C.) Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge are: Battelle, SiGNa Chemistry, Inc., Nalco Co., Dow AgroSciences and Michigan State University. Battelle (Columbus, Ohio; www.battelle.org) received the Greener Synthetic Pathways…
Dow Chemical (Midland, Mich; www.dow.com) has started using a renewable energy source — methane from landfill gas — at its Dalton, Ga., plant where carpet latex is manufactured. As a result, carpet-backing products manufactured with the so-called Dow Lomax technology,…
Chisso Corp. (Tokyo, Japan; www.chisso.co.jp) has established a new joint-venture (JV) company to produce solar grade silicon using a new process that was first developed by Chisso and subsequently refined, jointly, by the three JV partners: Chisso (50% share), Nippon…
Corn residue left in fermenters after ethanol production could find a future use as a filler in plastics through research being done at the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture’s North Central Agricultural Research Laboratory (Brookings, S.D.; www.ars.usda.gov). The granular residue, called…