Latest News
Kensing to acquire surfactants and specialty esters business from Evonik
Kensing, LLC (Kankakee, Ill.; www.kensingsolutions.com), a leading manufacturer of natural vitamin E, plant sterols, specialty esters and high-purity anionic surfactants, and a portfolio company of One Rock Capital Partners, LLC, today announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement…
Biodegradable corn-based adhesive is non-toxic, with tunable properties
A new class of adhesives being developed by the startup gluECO Adhesives LLC (Ashburnham, Mass.; www.glueco-adhesives.com) is based on corn proteins and has a host of environmentally friendly properties, such as biodegradability and the ability to be easily removed in…
Upcycling of waste ABS into 3D-printable material with enhanced properties
In an advancement toward circularity for commodity plastics, researchers at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL; Oak Ridge, Tenn.; www.ornl.gov) have developed a method for upcycling the commodity thermoplastic acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) into an ABS-vitrimer material that can be…
Commercial debut for sand-based thermal-energy storage
Last month, operation began at Polar Night Energy Oy’s (Tampere, Finland; www.polarnightenergy.com) first commercial sand-based thermal-energy storage system. The thermal storage system, which is located at the Vatajankoski power plant, is now producing low-emission district heating to the city of…
Chementator Briefs
Biomethane Last month, NextChem, a subsidiary of Maire Tecnimont S.p.A. (Rome, Italy; www.mairetecnimont.com) was awarded a contract by ENGIE subsidiary Storengy (Bois-Colombes Cedex, France; www.storengy.com) to perform an advanced basic-engineering study for a plant that will produce second-generation biomethane from…
A more-sensitive way to differentiate chiral compounds
Circular dichroism (CD) is the established method for distinguishing between enantiomers — the optical isomers of molecules that are mirror images of each other. In this approach, circularly polarized light is passed through the sample and is absorbed differently by…
Extending the operating temperature of biological phosphorus removal
Currently, enhanced biological phosphorus removal (EBPR) techniques in municipal wastewater-treatment plants (WWTPs) do not work well at temperatures above 25°C, which is common in warm countries. This limitation is expected to extend to more countries with the advent of global…
Limpet tooth inspires strongest biomaterial
An interdisciplinary team of biologists, chemists and engineers from the University of Portsmouth (U.K.; www.port.ac.uk) have become the first to successfully grow a limpet-inspired biomaterial with extreme strength. The common limpet (Patella vulgata) is a small, snail-like mollusk with a…
Biosynthesis of renewable, high-energy-density, cyclopropane-based fuels
Cyclopropane-functionalized hydrocarbons can be excellent fuels because of their high energy densities, but organic synthesis of such fuels is difficult. In work recently published in the journal Joule, a research team led by Jay Keasling at the Joint Bioenergy Institute…
Ethernet-APL: The Future of Field Connectivity
Ethernet Advanced Physical Layer (APL) provides connectivity between field-generated data and enterprise systems. Presented here is information on the design and operation of this rapidly expanding technology Process plants today have vast amounts of data available at the field level…