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Chemical Engineering

Recycling electrolyte from vanadium RFBs

U.S. Vanadium LLC (Hot Springs, Ark.; www.usvanadium.com) has successfully demonstrated the ability to recycle the liquid electrolyte used in vanadium redox-flow batteries (VRFB), a rapidly growing commercial technology that promises to enable intermittent renewable energy technologies, such as solar and…

Thermal-energy storage system can decarbonize industrial heat

A closed-loop, long-duration energy-storage system (diagram) developed by Malta, Inc. (Cambridge, Mass.; www.maltainc.com) could provide a carbon-neutral path to industrial heating. “One of the exciting facets of this technology is that it generates a lot of discharge heat. When we…

Methane-pyrolysis process leverages natural gas for CO2-free H2 generation

Engineering design of a demonstration plant is underway for a process that pyrolyzes natural gas into hydrogen and solid carbon. The process was developed by C-Zero Inc. (Goleta, Calif.; www.czero.energy), a company set up in 2018 to develop and commercialize…

New crushing station makes its commercial debut in Brazil

Last month, Amarillo Gold Corp. (Toronto, Canada; www.amarillogold.com) selected Metso Outotec’s (Helsinki, Finland; www.mogroup.com) modular FIT Station for its Posse Gold greenfield mining project in the state of Goiás in central Brazil. This will be the first commercial installation of…

Chementator briefs

L-Alanine DMC Biotechnologies, Inc. (DMC; Boulder, Colo.; www.dmcbio.com) has successfully demonstrated full commercial scale (85 m3) fermentation for its first product, the amino acid L-alanine. The scaleup results identically tracked the performance at bench and pilot scales, further validating the…

Engineering catalysts with ALD

Atomic-layer deposition (ALD), a surface engineering technique that applies layers of coatings in a conformal way at single-atom thicknesses, is being investigated for its potential to improve the selectivity and durability of industrial catalysts under a U.S. Dept. of Energy…

Piezoelectric wood

Researchers at the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology (Empa; Dübendorf; www.empa.ch) and ETH Zurich (both Switzerland; www.ethz.ch) have made wood compressible and turned it into a piezoelectric generator. The research, reported last month in the journal Science…

Integrating intelligent technologies for smarter rice mills

Bühler AG (Uzwil, Switzerland; www.buhlergroup.com) is making a major step towards digitally connected rice mills of the future. The first rollout for integrated rice mills is entering the final stages, with the initial setup using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine…

Sewage-to-Hydrogen plant reaches completion in Tokyo

Renewable hydrogen systems manufacturer Ways2H Inc. (Long Beach, Calif.) and its shareholder and technical partner Japan Blue Energy Co. (JBEC) announced the completion of a Tokyo facility that will convert sewage sludge into renewable hydrogen fuel for fuel cell mobility…

Plug Power and Brookfield Renewable Partners to build green hydrogen plant in Pennsylvania

Plug Power (Latham, N.Y.), together with Brookfield Renewable Partners L.P., which is, together with its institutional partners, an owner and operator of one of the world’s largest publicly traded pure-play renewable power platforms, announced plans to build a green hydrogen…