Latest News: Technologies
A new metals-recovery process moves to the pilot scale
Significant improvements to a process to extract vanadium, titanium and iron from the Mount Peake Vanadium-Titanium-Iron Project in the Northern Territory of Australia will be tested in a pilot plant now under construction and nearing completion. Results of the pilot-plant…
Carbon mineralization process monetizes CO2 from fluegas
The Capitol SkyMine project in San Antonio, Tex. utilizes fluegas from an existing cement plant to manufacture salable chemicals while preventing the CO2 from reaching the atmosphere. Built by Skyonic Corp. (Austin, Tex.; www.skyonic.com), the project is said to be…
Commercial debut for a new bioleaching process
Division Radomiro Tomic of Codelco (Codelco Corporación Nacional del Cobre de Chile; Santiago; www.codelco.www) is adopting a bioleaching process to recover copper from low-grade ores. The process was developed by BioSigma S.A. — a joint venture (JV) of JX Nippon…
November Chementator Briefs
Graphene continues to show new, promising properties Researchers from Monash University (Melbourne, Australia; www.monash.edu.au) have discovered that graphene oxide sheets can change their structure and become liquid droplets spontaneously. Because graphene droplets change their structure in response to an…
‘Clean power’ demo
Last month, NET Power, LLC (Durham, N.C.; www.net-power.com) announced the completion of major project agreements for its first-of-a-kind power plant — a 50-MWth demonstration plant that will validate the world’s first natural-gas power generation system that produces no air emissions,…
Large-scale CCS
Last month, the first commercial-scale, post-combustion carbon capture and storage (CCS) plant started up in Saskatchewan, Canada. The SaskPower facility at the Boundary Dam Power Station is expected to capture around 1 million m.t./yr of CO2, which is up to…
Making nanoparticles
Scientists from the Materials Science and Technology Div. of the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (Washington, D.C.; www.nrl.navy.mil) have developed a one-step process to form oxide nanoparticles. The technique is capable of producing large quantities (10 g) of oxide nanoparticles —…
Graphene surprise
Researchers from Monash University (Melbourne, Australia; www.monash.edu.au) have discovered that graphene-oxide sheets can change their structure and become liquid droplets spontaneously. Because graphene droplets change their structure in response to an applied magnetic field, they could be used for controlled…
Ultrasound enzyme hydrolysis
Aiming to understand the nature of the synergistic effect of ultrasound and enzymes in the production of fermentable sugars from lignocellulosic biomass, researchers from the Institute of Chemical Technology (Mumbai, India; www.ictmumbai.edu.in) have studied the ultrasound-assisted enzymatic hydrolysis of waste…
High-strength steel checkup
Researchers from the Fraunhofer Institute for Nondestructive Testing (IZFP; Saarbrücken, Germany; www.izfp.fraunhofer.de) have developed the so-called Magnus hybrid — an inspection system that combines micromagnetic and ultrasound techniques to characterize materials. The micromagnetic method helps determine hardness, tensile strength and…