Latest News: Technologies
The commercial launch of 3-D-printed membranes
Last month, Nano Sun, a water technology start-up founded by a scientist from Nanyang Technological University (NTU; Singapore; www.ntu.edu.sg) launched a 3-D-printing facility to manufacture a new type of water-treatment membrane. Unlike conventional membrane-manufacturing processes, which use acids to make…
Chementator Briefs
TPA from PET bottles A chemical method previously developed for recovering monomers from polyester blend fabrics and textiles has now been adapted for use with waste plastic bottles made from polyethylene terephthalate (PET). The BCD Group (Cincinnati, Ohio; www.bcdinternational.com) developed…
Low-cost solar thermal technology to be coupled with energy storage
Sunvapor Inc. (Livermore, Calif.; www.sunvapor.net) was awarded a grant from the U.S. Dept. of Energy (DOE; Washington, D.C.; www.energy.gov) last month to scale up its Green Parabolic Trough Collector, a solar thermal technology that cuts construction costs by half compared…
New LEDs offer improved properties
Flexible micro light-emitting diodes (LEDs) — a sub-100-µm light source for red, green and blue light — have become a strong candidate for the next-generation display due to their low power consumption, fast response, and flexibility. The previous micro-LED technology…
A push to upgrade naphthas into petrochemicals
Last month, MOL Group (Budapest, Hungary: www.mol.hu) entered into a strategic partnership with Inovacat (Amersfoort, the Netherlands; www.inovacat.com) to further upscale and commercialize Inovacat’s Gasolfin gasoline-to-olefins technology, which converts low-valued gasoline and naphthas into high-value propylene, butylene and BTX (benzene,…
Extracting lithium from waste brine without ponds
The growing demand for lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) has created incentives to improve processes for extracting lithium from brine. Current Li-extraction processes involve pumping brine from underground into shallow pools for evaporation and concentration. But the traditional method has several significant…
More scalable method for membrane separations
Membranes present a lower-energy alternative to distillation for the separation of hydrocarbons, but these processes are often limited by prohibitively expensive materials or intricate fabrication steps. Now, a team of researchers from Texas A&M University (TAMU; College Station, Tex.; www.tamu.edu)…
The first commercial power-to-liquids plant planned
Nordic Blue Crude A/S (NBC; Porsgrunn, Norway; www.nordicbluecrude.no) intends to build the first power-to-liquids (PtL) plant in the Norwegian industrial park of Heroya, located 140 km southeast of Oslo. Although the date for the startup has not yet been released,…
Fast-pyrolysis process recovers valuable materials from tires
Each year, more than 1 billion automobile tires are replaced worldwide. Together, the used tires contain 4.4 million metric tons of valuable products, such as carbon black, metals, fuels and chemicals. In an effort to recover these materials, the University…
Making amine-based CO2 adsorbents more stable
Amine-containing solids have been investigated as promising adsorbents for CO2 capture, but existing amine-containing adsorbents degrade by oxidation, making them unreliable for repeated CO2 adsorption-desorption cycles over a long period. The low stability requires the continuous addition of fresh adsorbents,…