In recent years, engineers at ETH Zurich have developed technology to produce liquid fuels from sunlight and air. At the heart of the production process is a solar reactor that is exposed to concentrated sunlight delivered by a parabolic mirror…
Substituting nitrogen atoms for aromatic carbon atoms at specific locations within the molecular skeleton of a possible therapeutic agent can have significant effects on molecular properties critical for biological activity, such as hydrogen bonding, polarity, metabolic stability, target specificity and…
With the approval of funding from the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action and the State of Rhineland-Palatinate, BASF SE (Ludwigshafen, Germany; www.basf.com) has come a major step closer in building a proton exchange membrane electrolyzer. In…
The following is a selection of recently published books with relevance to parts of the chemical process industries (CPI) Integrated Process Modeling, Advanced Control and Data Analytics for Optimizing Polyolefin Manufacturing. By Y.A. Liu and Niket Sharma, Wiley-VCH Publishing, 2023,…
The Vilsmeier reagent (VR), [(CH3)2 NCHCl]Cl, is necessary for producing a large range of pharmaceuticals, but it is unstable in air and is made from the toxic precursor phosgene (COCl2). A new flow-reactor system has been developed by Akihiko Tsuda,…
Coolbrook Oy (Helsinki, Finland; www.coolbrook.com) has successfully completed the first phase of large-scale pilot testing (photo) for its RotoDynamic Technology at the Brightlands Chemelot Campus in Geleen, the Netherlands. During 2023, Coolbrook has been running a test program to demonstrate…
Bioresorbable polymers — those that degrade naturally over time and can be absorbed by the body — are essential for delivering a number of advanced biomedical technologies to patients, including long-acting injectable or implanted products, regenerative scaffolds, degradable medical devices,…
Alliant Energy (Madison, Wis.; www.alliantenergy.com) was recently selected to receive a $30-million grant from the U.S. Dept. of Energy’s Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations (OCED; Washington, D.C.; www.energy.gov/oced) for a proposed 200-MWh energy storage system. Alliant Energy’s new battery system,…
Building off of a process to efficiently manufacture graphene (see Chem. Eng., April 2022, p. 9), a team of researchers from Rice University (Houston, www.rice.edu) have uncovered that the process can be easily altered to also produce a nearly pure…
The efficiency and cost effectiveness of modularity provides advantages for small- and large-scale projects When the right conditions exist, the benefits of modular construction — from laboratory scale to large scale — are plentiful and allow single-source, cost-effective and efficient…