In The News
Integrating intelligent technologies for smarter rice mills
Bühler AG (Uzwil, Switzerland; www.buhlergroup.com) is making a major step towards digitally connected rice mills of the future. The first rollout for integrated rice mills is entering the final stages, with the initial setup using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine…
Cybersecurity: Continuous Vigilance Required
As digitalization becomes more common and remote operations become necessary, guarding against cybersecurity breaches grows even more critical The hacking of a Florida water plant, which made headlines in February, was a poignant reminder of the dangers posed by breaches…
Direct metal conversion streamlines cathode-material supply chain
As application demands evolve, battery materials have gotten more complex, incorporating not only lithium, but higher nickel, manganese and cobalt content, while also including various dopants like aluminum or zirconium and stabilizing coatings. Processing all of these disparate components into…
Recycling electrolyte from vanadium RFBs
U.S. Vanadium LLC (Hot Springs, Ark.; www.usvanadium.com) has successfully demonstrated the ability to recycle the liquid electrolyte used in vanadium redox-flow batteries (VRFB), a rapidly growing commercial technology that promises to enable intermittent renewable energy technologies, such as solar and…
Thermal-energy storage system can decarbonize industrial heat
A closed-loop, long-duration energy-storage system (diagram) developed by Malta, Inc. (Cambridge, Mass.; www.maltainc.com) could provide a carbon-neutral path to industrial heating. “One of the exciting facets of this technology is that it generates a lot of discharge heat. When we…
LLE technology closes the loop on phenol removal
Many industrial processes involve phenol, but its toxic nature means that it must be effectively removed from waste streams prior to any subsequent biological treatment steps. Phenol can be removed via evaporation, but this method is quite energy-intensive. Alternatively, the…
Modular NGL recovery
Honeywell UOP (Des Plaines, Ill.; www.uop.com) has adapted its recycle-split-vapor (RSV) technology for natural-gas liquid (NGL) recovery into a new, modular offering, RSV2, which enables quick retrofitting of existing gas-processing plants with minimal downtime. “The RSV2 technology can increase ethane…
Crystallization: Contributing to Circularity
In a variety of industrial applications, crystallization technologies contribute to the circularity of manufacturing processes and supply chains Crystallization is a major unit operation in the chemical process industries (CPI), typically used for separating and purifying materials in a wide…
New process for synthetic eugenol available to fragrance market
Solvay S.A. (Brussels, Belgium; www.solvay.com) recently announced a new commercial process for synthetic eugenol (diagram), a derivative of phenol, whose natural version is extracted from clove oil obtained from dried flower buds of clove trees grown in Indonesia and Madagascar.…
Separate xylene isomers with less energy
Xylene isomers are usually derived from the catalytic reforming of crude oil, and require costly methods to separate them from each other, including distillation, fractional crystallization and adsorption in high-temperature and high-pressure environments. “The separation of xylene’s isomers requires much…