Typically, the production of fuel-grade chemicals, such as butanol, from biomass fermentation processes involves low-yield batch processes and high energy costs. Now, researchers from Imperial College London (ICL; www.imperial.ac.uk), in partnership with bp plc (London; www.bp.com), have demonstrated a new…
MDI Production Late last year, Covestro AG (Leverkusen, Germany; www.covestro.com) started up a pilot plant for the production of methylene diphenyl diisocyanate (MDI) based on the innovative AdiP (adiabatic-isothermal phosgenation) technology at its Brunsbüttel site. The new technology promises to…
Titanium dioxide is well known as a photocatalyst, and is especially promising for degrading organic-based contaminant molecules in wastewater. Researchers from China and Australia have reported, in a recent issue of the Journal of Colloid and Interface Science, that controlling…
A new technique for making less-expensive, more-efficient biological enzyme hybrids could have widespread applications, including in water recycling, drug manufacturing and molecular biology. The technique, developed by a team from Australia and the U.S., involves using a vortex fluidic device…
A Korean team has proposed an approach for passive radiative cooling. The team, which includes professors Junsuk Rho and Jin Kon Kim of Pohang Universiy of Science and Technology (Pohang, South Korea; www.postech.ac.kr) and professor Heon Lee of Korea University…
A process developed by Evrnu (Seattle, Wash.; www.evrnu.com) to regenerate cotton fibers from waste fabric and post-consumer garments has been used to produce ton quantities of recycled cotton fiber for testing. An economically viable process for recycling cotton would have…
A new membrane technology for separating carbon dioxide from exhaust gas will be scaled up for real-world testing under a project to evaluate low-cost CO2 capture at a coal-fired power plant. Design and testing of an engineering-scale CO2-capture system will…
Late last November, the energy-transition start-up company Lumenion GmbH (Berlin, Germany; www.lumenion.com) received the 2020 Berlin Brandenburg Innovation Prize for its high-temperature, steel-based energy-storage technology. The system stores peaks of wind and solar energy by heating a steel core to…
The cryptography working group within the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF; Fremont, Calif.; www.ieft.org) standards organization has chosen the CPace protocol — developed by Endress + Hauser AG (Reinach, Switzerland; www.endress.com) — as a recommended method for use in internet…
Filtration is being investigated as an alternative to thermal separation methods (such as distillation and evaporation) in many applications because of the potential energy savings, but conventional filtration membranes, such as those used in water desalination, are often not robust…