Latest News
GEA supplies two plants for waste-heat utilization to India and Italy
GEA (Düsseldorf, Germany; www.gea.com) supplies Saint-Gobain with two Waste Heat Recovery Systems (WHRS) each for the utilization of waste heat from the float-glass production lines in Pisa, Italy and Sriperumbudur, India. Commissioning is planned for the first half of 2019.…
CPI Booklist for September 2018
The following list of recently published book titles shown here are relevant to professionals in various parts of the chemical process industries (CPI) Biotechnology of Metals: Principles, Recovery Methods and Environmental Concerns, By K.A. Natarajan, Elsevier ScienceDirect, 2018, 502 pages,…
Focusing on the workplace
The results of a recent survey (2018 Pulse of Engineering Survey*) give a snapshot of how over 2,200 survey respondents view their current work environments. The respondents were predominantly design engineers (37%), followed by those in research and development, consulting,…
Co-located Facilities: Untangling Environmental Compliance, Liability and Accountability Issues
When multiple operators, co-owners, co-operators and third-party contractors are all managing different engineered systems at the same location, extra care is needed to manage potential environmental issues that may arise The obligations facing facilities throughout the chemical process industries (CPI)…
CO2-to-methanol
Researchers from Penn State University (State College, Pa.; www.psu.edu) and Dalian University of Technology (Dalian, China; www.dlut.edu.cn) have improved the CO2-to-methanol process by using a catalyst that combines copper and palladium. Using a palladium-to-copper atomic ratio range of 0.3 to…
Solvent-based process to recycle multilayered film
Later this year (Q4 2018), APK AG (Merseburg, Germany; www.apk-ag.de) will start up the first commercial plant to recycle multilayer packaging using the company’s solvent-based Newcycling process. The plant will process 8,000 metric tons per year (m.t./yr) of post-industrial multilayer…
Non-thermal treatment method for high-salinity produced water
A new pilot project brings together advanced membrane filtration with non-thermal, zero-liquid-discharge (ZLD) solvent exchange to efficiently treat high-salinity produced water from oil-and-gas operations. PetroH2O Recovery (Southlake, Tex.; www.petroh2o.com) is currently building a pilot plant with the capacity to process…
CNT-based photocatalysts enable solar water splitting
Splitting water with sunlight is a sustainable and environmentally friendly way to make hydrogen, but the conversion efficiency is presently very low, because current photocatalysts only work using ultraviolet radiation — a small fraction (3–5%) of sunlight. Now, a promising…
Chementator Briefs
Bio-isoprene Yokohama Rubber Co. (Tokyo, Japan; www.yokohama.com) has developed what is said to be the world’s first technology capable of efficiently producing isoprene from biomass. The new breakthrough is the result of joint research with Riken (www.riken.jp) and Zeon Corp.…
Solvent-free recovery of plant-based extracts
Plant-based extracts, such as antioxidants, phytochemicals and polyphenols, are used in a number of end-markets, including cosmetics, foods and nutritional supplements. A proprietary, low-polarity, pressurized-water extraction method is set to drastically improve the recovery of useful ingredients from botanical sources.…