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A new production route to high-purity magnetite

Last month, Pittsburgh Iron Oxides, LLC (Pirox; New Brighton, Pa.; www.piroxllc.com) was granted U.S. patent No. 7,744,848 for its process of producing high-purity magnetite (Fe3O4). The company produces synthetic magnetite, tradenamed SuperMagnetite, which has greater than 99% purity and exhibits…

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Size reduction of cementitious material

Flyanic LLC (Newark, N.J.; www.flyanic.com) has developed an industrial-scale and economical process for grinding cement, flyash and other cementitious materials to a median particle size of 1 micron, making them suitable for use in concrete and mortar. For example, flyash…

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Super emulsion slashes biodiesel production costs by 25%

The research group of Kazuo Tajima at Kanagawa University (Yokohama, Japan; apchem2.kanagawa-u.ac.jp) have developed a new emulsification process that enables biodiesel fuels (BDFs) to be used without any purification process, thereby reducing production costs by one fourth. Tajima estimates that…

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Nanopores improving sterile filtration

Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Mechanics of Materials (IWM; Halle, Germany; www.fraunhofer.de) have developed ceramic membranes with uniform pore structure and tight pore-size distribution, which makes them more stable and delivers considerably higher flowrates than existing ceramic membranes, which…

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This rheometer performs multipass measurements

Strata Technology Ltd. (Sunbury-on-Thames, U.K.; www.stratatec.co.uk) has commercialized the Cambridge Multipass Rheometer (MPR), which was developed by professor Malcolm Mackley at the Dept. of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology, Cambridge University (www.ceb.cam.ac.uk) for advanced studies of the rheological properties of melts,…

Control mercury emissions from coal-fired plants without treating the fluegas

ADA-ES, Inc. (Littleton, Colo.; www.adaes.com) and Arch Coal, Inc. (St. Louis, Mo.), the U.S.’s second-largest coal producer, have signed an exclusive development and licensing agreement for an ADA-ES process that reduces mercury emissions from coal-fired plants by pretreating the coal.…

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Novel gasifier uses liquid copper as the heat source

Liquid copper is employed to gasify wastes in a process being developed by Ze-gen (Boston, Mass.; www.ze-gen.com) and will be tested in a small commercial plant in an industrial park in Attleboro, Mass. Scheduled for completion late next year, the…

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This lignite-drying process increases the efficiency of power and gasification plants

Last month, RWE Power (Cologne, Germany; www.rwe.com) and Linde-KCA-Dresden GmbH (www.linde-kca.com), a subsidiary of The Linde Group (Munich, Germany; www.linde.com), signed a framework agreement on the use of RWE’s WTA technology — a German acronym for fluidized-bed (FB) drying with internal…

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Molybdenum-oxo catalyst offers cheap route to H2 from water

A novel catalyst designed by scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley, Calif.; www.lbl.gov) and the University of California at Berkeley (www.berkeley.edu) has shown the ability to catalyze the electrolysis of water into hydrogen and…

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Produce polymer nanofibers at greater yield and control

New technology for fabricating nanoscale polymer threads boosts yields and improves control compared to conventional methods for producing nanoscale fibers by using a technique analogous to that for making cotton candy. The technology, known as rotary jet spinning (RJS), was…