Nanofiltration Toray Industries, Inc. (Tokyo, Japan; www.toray.com) has created what is claimed to be the world’s highest-level nanofiltration membrane. The new membrane triples the permeation performance of conventional models while enhancing ion and organic-compound separation from aqueous solutions. In developing…
Scientists have long sought ways to take advantage of the high strength of natural silk protein in new materials, but its incorporation has been hindered by the inability to stabilize the protein in water. Now, a company known as Evolved…
The seemingly boundless versatility of additive manufacturing makes it an area ripe for fast evolution, but critical industrial applications also demand verification and reliability There is no doubt that 3D printing (also known industrially as additive manufacturing; AM) has set…
Technology developments are progressing towards large-scale production of ‘green’ hydrogen, along with improved methods for storage and transportation The world has an important opportunity to tap into hydrogen’s vast potential to become a critical part of a more sustainable and…
New laboratory instruments simplify the collection of accurate and consistent measurements to increase productivity and product quality Efficiency and optimization are key words when it comes to all aspects of chemical processing and the laboratory is no different. Like most…
Hypersaline industrial wastewater brines are difficult to treat. Current approaches for removing salt from such brines — such as evaporative distillation and reverse-osmosis (RO) — are problematic because evaporation is highly energy-intensive and RO cannot handle salt levels present in…
Plant Watch Oxea to build new carboxylic acids plant in Germany July 6, 2019 —Oxea (Monheim am Rhein, Germany; www.oxea-chemicals.com) is building a new world-scale production plant for carboxylic acids in Oberhausen, Germany. When brought onstream by the end of…
An international team, including staff from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (Kaist; Daejeon, South Korea; www.kaist.ac.kr), led by Kaist’s professor Jeung Ku Kang, has developed a technology to analyze the gas adsorption behavior of molecules of each…
Solar desalination Researchers at Rice University (Houston, Tex.; www.rice.edu) working on nanophotonics-enabled solar membrane distillation (NESMD) have found that concentrating sunlight on small areas of the desalination membrane leads to a non-linear improvement in performance in vapor pressure, which forces…
A modular, fuel-cell-like assembly featuring specially developed microbial communities is capable of producing pure hydrogen from a wide range of organic wastes. Developed by startup company Electro-Active Technologies (Oak Ridge, Tenn.; https://electroactive.tech), the microbial electrolysis system is now in the…