Next April, a six-year, €4-million project will begin that aims to develop an electrochemical process to recover halogens (chlorine, bromine and fluorine) from waste products. Funded as part of the CZS Breakthrough program of the Carl Zeiss Foundation (CZS; Heidenheim…
A new recycling process has been developed for scrap polypropylene (PP), a waste stream that is currently underserved by many plastics-recycling facilities. The process, developed by PureCycle (Orlando, Fla.; www.purecycle.com), aims to “wash the plastic molecules” using a series of…
A new electrowinning process is being field-trialed at the Prieska copper-zinc mine operated by Orion Minerals Ltd. (Melbourne, Australia; www.orionminerals.com.au) in South Africa, which will enable the production of valuable products, including calcium, magnesium, iron and others, from contaminated mine…
Batch reactors are widely used throughout the chemical process industries (CPI), and the basic design has not radically changed for many decades. Nevertheless, precise temperature control of batch processes continues to be a common problem. Now, a new design of…
The startup company RenewCO2 (Piscataway, N.J.; www.renewco2.com) has developed a catalyzed electrochemical process for selectively producing monoethylene glycol (MEG) in a single step using byproduct carbon dioxide from other processes as feedstock. MEG is important industrially because it is the…
Magnesium metal is important for several emerging potential sustainability-related applications, including carbon capture, low-carbon cement and energy storage. These potential applications are driving efforts to efficiently produce magnesium hydroxide, the raw material for manufacturing Mg metal. It is possible to…
An emerging electrolyzer technology for renewable hydrogen production is the anion-exchange membrane (AEM), which provides efficiency and cost benefits over other electrolyzer configurations. Until now, most AEM installations have been small, as the membrane assemblies’ size and durability limited the…
Catalysts by AM In late September, BASF SE (Ludwigshafen, Germany; www.basf.com) introduced X3D, a new additive-manufacturing (AM; 3D printing) technology for shaping catalysts. Catalysts produced with this technology feature an open structure, resulting in a reduction of the pressure drop…
Scientists at the U.S. Dept. of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL; Upton, N.Y.; www.bnl.gov) and collaborators at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL; Laurel Hollow, N.Y.; www.cshl.edu) have genetically engineered a strain of duckweed (Lemna japonica) to produce high yields of…
Hollow silica particles (HSPs) are materials of interest for thermal insulation applications because of their very low thermal conductivity, but the particles pose health hazards and the powder is impractical to use, so scientists have been trying to incorporate HSPs…