Researchers at Argonne National Laboratory (Lemont, Ill.; www.anl.gov) are investigating an electrochemical separation process known as capacitive deionization (CDI; diagram) to extract and recover ions from liquid streams in wide-ranging applications, including battery recycling and biomanufacturing. CDI holds several advantages…
Industrial gases are critical for a wide range of applications throughout the chemical process industries (CPI). Many of these gases must be separated from others, such as nitrogen from air, or hydrogen from natural gas using physical gas-separation techniques that…
Henry Kister shares lessons learned from troubleshooting distillation towers Many cooling-water systems do not have flowmeters. This is a tale about a cooling-water flowmeter that made a difference. As a startup superintendent at ICI Australia in the late 1970s, the…
A mixed-salt process (MSP) designed to reduce the costs and increase the energy efficiency of removing carbon dioxide from post-combustion fluegas is advancing in two related projects. In the first, a 10-MW engineering-scale demonstration plant for the MSP is under…
Operational troubleshooting guidance is provided for several scenarios involving trapped non-condensable gases in distillation towers Non-condensable gases are often present in distillation towers, either expectedly or unexpectedly. When they do appear, or when the quantity of non-condensable gases varies from…
Utilizing rare-earth elements (REEs), such as for permanent magnets in renewable energy applications, requires costly chemical separations that generate large volumes of waste. A process featuring new diglycolamide (DGA)-based ligands and liquid-liquid extraction exhibits more effective separation of individual REEs,…
A new recycling process claims to significantly reduce the complexity of recovering graphite from spent lithium-ion battery (LIB) materials by leaching out impurities rather than leaching out metal. By extracting impurities and recovering high-grade graphite, the Hydro-to-Anode technology, developed by…
thyssenkrupp’s Uhde High Pressure Technologies GmbH (Hagen, Germany). won an order from a company in the specialty chemicals sector to fabricate and supply a pharma-grade supercritical fluid extraction (SFE) plant. The scope of supply includes the skid-mounted plant, as well…
March 2022: The following is a list of recently published books that may be of interest to professionals in the chemical process industries (CPI) Overpressure Protection in the Process Industry: A Critical View. By Marc Hellemans, Elsevier Press, 2022, 396…
A new ultra-rapid plasma-based process could significantly expand the availability of premium materials for battery applications. Developed by 6K, Inc. (North Andover, Mass.; www.6kinc.com), UniMelt is a single-pass, continuous process that employs a proprietary microwave torch technology to create a…