Recently, Tosoh Corp. (Tokyo, Japan; www.tosoh.com) has applied a new, proprietary oxocatalyst in the oxychlorination process for making ethylene dichloride (EDC) from ethylene, HCl, and O2 in its vinyl chloride monomer (VCM) manufacturing process. The performance boost anticipated from simulation…
After four years of project development and execution, the new PolyFuel unit at Petrobrazi petroleum refinery in Romania has been started-up and is fully functional since April 2019. Based on the PolyFuel technology licensed by Axens (Rueil-Malmaison, France; www.axens.net), the…
A team from RMIT University (Melbourne, Australia; www.rmit.edu.au) and the National Institute of Technology, Warangal (Warangal, India; www.nitw.ac.in) has developed a cost-effective and eco-friendly way of producing graphene using a eucalyptus polyphenol solution extracted from eucalyptus bark. RMIT’s professor Suresh…
Nanofiltration Toray Industries, Inc. (Tokyo, Japan; www.toray.com) has created what is claimed to be the world’s highest-level nanofiltration membrane. The new membrane triples the permeation performance of conventional models while enhancing ion and organic-compound separation from aqueous solutions. In developing…
Scientists have long sought ways to take advantage of the high strength of natural silk protein in new materials, but its incorporation has been hindered by the inability to stabilize the protein in water. Now, a company known as Evolved…
Conventional plastics are difficult to recycle because end-of-life processing generally is either energy-intensive or alters the physical properties of the materials. A team of researchers from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley, Calif.; www.lbl.gov) and the University of California at…
Chemists from the research group of Stefania Grecea at the University of Amsterdam’s (UvA; the Netherlands; www.uva.nl) Research Priority Sustainable Chemistry have devised a way to enhance the practical performance of metal-organic frameworks (MOFs). By using leaves from the black…
Scientists from the University of Science and Technology of China (Hefei; https://en.ustc.edu.cn), led by professor Shu-Hong Yu, have developed a thermal insulator that mimics the structure of individual polar-bear hairs, and have scaled toward a material made of many hairs.…
Hypersaline industrial wastewater brines are difficult to treat. Current approaches for removing salt from such brines — such as evaporative distillation and reverse-osmosis (RO) — are problematic because evaporation is highly energy-intensive and RO cannot handle salt levels present in…
An international team, including staff from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (Kaist; Daejeon, South Korea; www.kaist.ac.kr), led by Kaist’s professor Jeung Ku Kang, has developed a technology to analyze the gas adsorption behavior of molecules of each…