Engineers at Air Products (Lehigh Valley, Pa.; www.airproducts.com) have commercialized an improved version of the company’s Cleanfire ThruPort oxy-fuel burner for avoiding downtime during repairs and extending the lifetime of air-fuel regenerative furnaces in glass-making plants. The company’s original Cleanfire…
Under mechanical stress, carbon-reinforced epoxy-resin composite materials can experience cracking and de-lamination at the junctures between layers of material, where the composites are resin-rich. Placing vertically aligned carbon nanotubes (VACNTs) into the inter-laminar regions can toughen the composite and prevent…
Tsukishima Kikai Co. (www.tsk-g.co.jp) and JFE Engineering Corp. (both Tokyo, Japan; www.jfe-eng.co.jp) have demonstrated a process that produces bioethanol from bagasse, a waste product in the production of sugar from sugarcane. With support from NEDO under a four-year, $10-million project,…
Hitachi Zosen Corp. (HITZ, Osaka and Tokyo, Japan; www.hitachizosen.co.jp) has installed a solid-oxide fuel cell (SOFC) demonstration unit at Osaka Research Institute of Industrial Science and Technology, Izumi Center (Orist; Osaka, http://orist.jp), and has been performing tests since June. The…
Quaternary diaphragm pumps deliver the low pulsation and shear that is critical to these biopharmaceutical and continuous-manufacturing operations Biopharmaceutical, pharmaceutical and nutraceutical manufacturing may come in a wide variety of forms, but every iteration of unit operation must adhere to…
The Sabatier reaction, in which H2 and CO2 react at temperatures of 300–400°C in the presence of a nickel catalyst, or an alumina-supported ruthenium catalyst, is one way to reduce CO2 into methane. Until now, however, it has been difficult…
Nippon Shokubai Co. (Osaka and Tokyo, Japan; www.shokubai.co.jp) has jointly developed a new process for biomass utilization in collaboration with professor Yuichi Kita at Kobe University (www.kobe-u.ac.jp). The process is highly efficient for decomposing lignocellulose into a group of water-soluble…
While demand for the artificial sweetener xylitol grows, expensive raw materials and low yields have kept production prices high. Now, a new process from S2G BioChem (Vancouver, B.C., Canada; www.s2gbiochem.com) aims to produce xylitol in a more cost-effective way, utilizing…
Natural gas vehicles (NGVs) are attractive because of the low cost and wide availability of natural gas, plus the ability to connect to residential and business gas lines for fueling. Among the challenges for using natural gas as a fuel…
Characterizing mixer impellers on the basis of power, flow, shear and efficiency Mixing has been defined as “the application of mechanical motion in order to create fluid dynamic effects that achieve a desired process result” [1]. The process result is…