Plastic-bottle waste is toxic and non-biodegradable, and has become a major environmental issue. It often ends up in the oceans, affecting marine life, or in landfills, contaminating groundwater and affecting land use. Now a team led by professors Nhan Phan-Thien…
A team from the University of Kentucky (Lexington, Ky.; www.uky.edu) and Virginia Polytechnic Institute (Blacksburg, Va.; www.vt.edu) has set up a novel pilot plant to recover rare-earth elements (REEs) from coal-based sources, aiming to produce high-grade REE concentrates from coal-based…
The increased demand for lithium in recent years — driven mainly by battery manufacturing — has broadened the scope of lithium-processing technologies. Typically, lithium is mined from spodumene ore or sourced from brine deposits, but a new process enables lithium’s…
Amid a tight labor market, CPI workers at all levels are in high demand as the range of jobs requiring chemical engineering expertise becomes increasingly diverse Many current indicators suggest that it is a great time to be working in…
Flame-spray pyrolysis (FSP) is a type of aerosol synthesis in which solid particles condense from the vapor phase after the combustion of droplets of solution. FSP has been used to produce industrially important nanoscale solids, such as fumed silica, alloy…
Plant Watch Synthomer opens expanded nitrile latex production facility in Malaysia November 13, 2018 — Synthomer (London, U.K.; www.synthomer.com) opened its expanded nitrile latex production facility in Pasir Gudang, Malaysia. This $63.5-million project added 90,000 metric tons per year (m.t./yr)…
New user-friendly solutions help chemical processors tackle tasks beyond design and optimization Initially, steady-state simulation was used in the chemical process industries (CPI) to design a plant or a process. Advances in the technology, along with the need to produce…
Commercial Debut The world’s first commercial plant based on the patented PLAneo technology of thyssenkrupp Industrial Solutions AG (Essen, Germany; www.thyssenkrupp-industrial-solutions.com) recently started production in Changchun, China. Operated by the Jilin COFCO Biomaterial Corp., the new plant produces all standard…
Today, all commercial lithium is sourced from ores or brines on land, where the total lithium reserves amount to 14 million tons. In contrast, the oceans contain 230 billion tons of lithium, although the lithium concentration in seawater is very…
Current oil-water separation technologies, such as centrifugation, filtration, dissolved air flotation, distillation, oil skinners, adsorption and electrochemical methods, are of low efficiency and consume a lot of energy during complex separation processes. Mesh membranes have attracted much interest lately, and…