In The News
Waste garlic stems make an adsorbent for arsenic removal
Professor Monoj Kumar Mondal and Anuj Kumar Prajapati from the Dept. of Chemical Engineering and Technology, Indian Institute of Technology (Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, India; www.iitbhu.ac.in) have used nanoporous activated garlic stem carbon (AGSC) — prepared from garlic stem waste…
Integrated AC process eliminates refrigerants
With the goal of decreasing the climate impact of residential air conditioning (AC), Kraton Corp. (Houston; www.kraton.com) has developed the NexarCool technology in collaboration with Texas A&M University (College Station; www.tamu.edu), India Institute of Technology Bombay (www.iitb.ac.in) and Indian companies…
Plant Watch: January 2020
Plant Watch Messer to build onsite gas facility for MOL polyols plant in Hungary December 12, 2019 — Messer Group GmbH (Bad Soden, Germany; www.messergroup.com) will construct a new onsite gas facility for MOL Group (Budapest, Hungary; www.molgroup.info) in Tiszaújváros,…
Chementator Briefs
Sludge to fuel Bio-sludge is a byproduct of the wastewater treatment process at Stora Enso Oy’s (Helsinki, Finland; www.storaenso.com) Heinola fluting mill in Finland. In the past, the mill had been burning the bio-sludge at the power station for generating…
Bottom-up synthesis of new perovskite material for ammonia production
Perovskites are a class of synthetic materials that have a crystalline structure similar to that of the naturally occurring mineral calcium titanate. They have been the subject of many studies because they exhibit unique properties that can be tuned according…
Metals from nodules on seabed offer environmental advantages
Small-scale pilot testing has begun for a process that extracts nickel, manganese, cobalt and copper from nodules collected from the surface of the Pacific Ocean seafloor. Obtaining the metals from the seabed nodules has advantages over mining land-based ores because…
New material promises to enhance performance of gas-separation membranes
Harnessing its polymer technology and carbon-fiber expertise has enabled Toray Industries, Inc. (Tokyo, Japan; www.toray.com) to create a porous carbon fiber with uniformly continuous pores (diagram) — claimed to be a world’s first. Using this fiber as a support layer…
Particle Size Matters
With the right technology, chemical processors can obtain precise particle size and consistent material while improving throughput and quality Particle sizing is an essential task in the chemical process industries (CPI) where achieving high-quality product efficiently and at a low…
A Pt-free electrode promises to cut costs for fuel cells and metal-air batteries
Hiroya Abe and colleagues at Tohoku University (Sendai, www.tohoku.ac.jp) and Hokkaido University have developed a method to fabricate a highly active catalyst electrode for performing the oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) in fuel cells and metal-air batteries. Currently, such fuel cells…
Gas Fermentation Leads Honored Achievements
The winning technology for the 2019 Kirkpatrick Chemical Engineering Achievement Award, along with the other finalist technologies, demonstrate how innovative engineering can tackle climate change and other challenges. All six technologies are described here The six finalist technologies for the…