DOMO Chemicals to invest €12 million in new nylon plant in China March 13, 2020 — DOMO Chemicals GmbH (Leuna, Germany; www.domochemicals.com) will invest €12 million for a new nylon production plant in Zhejiang, China. The new plant will be…
Today’s steam crackers are bigger than ever — those of tomorrow might be carbon neutral Steam cracking is a key process of the petrochemical industry, whereby naphtha or other petroleum-based feedstock is thermally broken down (cracked) into smaller building-block compounds,…
Improved equipment and controls, as well as continuous mixing, improve efficiency Optimization is imperative for today’s chemical processors who strive to remain competitive by providing higher quality products at lower costs in a more timely fashion. And mixing operations are…
Li2CO3 from brine Purities of greater than 99.9% for battery-quality lithium carbonate have been achieved using a proprietary artificial-intelligence-powered crystallization technology developed by Standard Lithium Ltd. (Vancouver, B.C.; www.standardlithium.com). The total cation contaminant levels were reduced from nearly 2,500 parts…
Anellotech (Pearl River, N.Y.; www.anellotech.com) recently announced a successful laboratory demonstration of a process to convert mixed plastic waste into a host of useful starting materials for new plastics. The process (diagram), known as Plas-T-Cat, would take place in a…
Caprolactam Genomatica (San Diego, Calif.; www.genomatica.com) recently announced the production of the world’s first renewably sourced ton of caprolactam, the key ingredient for nylon-6. The company made the caprolactam by fermenting plant sugars with engineered microbes, departing from the conventional…
A technology that removes oil from the surface of water without pumps or chemicals has been developed by German researchers at the Universities of Bonn (www.uni-bonn.de) and Aachen (www.uni-aachen.de) and textile-manufacturer Heimbach GmbH (Düren, Germany; www.heimbach.com). Textiles with special surface…
Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley, Calif.; www.lbl.gov) recently reported a process for converting various blends of cellulosic biomass and municipal solid waste (MSW) into aliphatic methyl ketones. The team used bio-derived ionic liquids to first break down the…
Mitsubishi Gas Chemical to build hydrogen peroxide plant in Taiwan February 13, 2020 — Mitsubishi Gas Chemical Co., Inc. (Tokyo, Japan; www.mgc.co.jp) plans to build a hydrogen peroxide production facility in Taiwan to support the company’s business for ultra-pure hydrogen…
A team of researchers at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI; Worcester, Mass.; www.wpi.edu) are investigating hydrothermal liquefaction (HTL) to simultaneously treat a variety of municipal waste streams and create biofuels. “HTL is an emerging technology for the conversion of various types…