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Kemira forms AKD wax joint venture in China

Kemira Oyj (Helsinki, Finland; www.kemira.com) has formed a joint venture with a producer of alkyl ketene dimer (AKD) wax in China. With this agreement, Kemira forms a joint venture – Kemira TC Wanfeng Chemicals Yanzhou (NewCo)  – with Shandong Tiancheng…

DuPont Water Solutions opens new RO membrane manufacturing plant at Sadara facility

DuPont Water Solutions (www.dupont.com/water), a part of the DuPont Safety & Construction business, opened its new reverse osmosis (RO) production line in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Located in Jubail Industrial City II, the facility will manufacture membrane technology and…

Siemens and Aker Solutions to strengthen digital offerings through strategic collaboration

Aker Solutions  (Fornebu, Norway; www.akersolutions.com) and Siemens AG (Munich and Berlin, Germany; www.siemens.com) have signed a strategic collaboration agreement to further develop digital offerings in engineering, operations and services. The collaboration focuses on the creation of software applications and joint…

Hanwha Total Petrochemical invests in a new polypropylene plant

Hanwha Total Petrochemical (www.hanwha-total.com), a 50/50 joint venture between Total S.A. (Paris, France; www.total.com) and Hanwha Group (Seoul, South Korea; www.hanwha.com), will invest nearly $500 million to further expand its Daesan integrated refining and petrochemical complex in South Korea. The…

Keeping up with automation

Last month, news broadcasts announced that an artificial intelligence (AI) news anchor, said to be the world’s first ever, had gone live in China. 1 The AI anchor was modeled after a real-life news presenter, and is said to be…

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New process taps into lithium-bearing micas

The increased demand for lithium in recent years — driven mainly by battery manufacturing — has broadened the scope of lithium-processing technologies. Typically, lithium is mined from spodumene ore or sourced from brine deposits, but a new process enables lithium’s…

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Advanced facility accelerates commercial development of nanoscale materials

Flame-spray pyrolysis (FSP) is a type of aerosol synthesis in which solid particles condense from the vapor phase after the combustion of droplets of solution. FSP has been used to produce industrially important nanoscale solids, such as fumed silica, alloy…

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Chementator Briefs

Commercial Debut The world’s first commercial plant based on the patented PLAneo technology of thyssenkrupp Industrial Solutions AG (Essen, Germany; www.thyssenkrupp-industrial-solutions.com) recently started production in Changchun, China. Operated by the Jilin COFCO Biomaterial Corp., the new plant produces all standard…

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A solar-powered electrolysis process extracts lithium from seawater

Today, all commercial lithium is sourced from ores or brines on land, where the total lithium reserves amount to 14 million tons. In contrast, the oceans contain 230 billion tons of lithium, although the lithium concentration in seawater is very…

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MOF-coated mesh membranes separate oil from water

Current oil-water separation technologies, such as centrifugation, filtration, dissolved air flotation, distillation, oil skinners, adsorption and electrochemical methods, are of low efficiency and consume a lot of energy during complex separation processes. Mesh membranes have attracted much interest lately, and…