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 (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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
In order for ammonia to serve as a hydrogen carrier, it is necessary to develop separation techniques that can reliably recover H2 from the decomposition of NH3 with sufficient purity for operating proton-exchange membrane (PEM) fuel cells. A step in…
Aerogels — ultralight, insulating and heat-resistant nanoporous solids — offer benefits in many applications, but commercially available aerogels are typically limited to just two formats: particles and blankets. Aerogel Technologies, LLC (Boston, Mass.; www.aerogeltechnologies.com) is currently constructing a pilot plant…