Latest News: Technologies
Lignin recovery process could improve profits for papermakers
Recovery boilers, in which pulp and paper companies burn spent black liquor from the kraft pulping process to recover and recycle sodium and sulfur, are a bottleneck in many paper mills. The reason is that they operate at their upper…
A new catalyst enables room-temperature interconversion of CO2 and formic acid
A new catalyst that converts H2 and CO2 into formic acid under mild conditions has been developed by researchers at the Solar Light Energy Conversion Group of Energy Technology Research Institute, National Institute for Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST;…
Base-catalyzed nucleophyllic additions with a modified zeolite
A new solid-state basic catalyst for forming carbon-carbon bonds has been developed by Masaru Ogura, an associate professor, and his research group at the Institute of Industrial Science, University of Tokyo (www.u-tokyo.ac.jp). The catalyst has been shown to accelerate the…
Scaleup for a new delignification process
This month, Borregaard Industries Ltd. (Sarpsborg, Norway; www.borregaard.com) will start up an integrated, pilot-demonstration plant to further develop a new pretreatment process for converting biomass into lignin and fermentable sugars. Located at the company’s R&D Center in Sarpsborg, the pilot…
A more sensitive sensor for ions in solution
A research team from the Institute for Photonics and Advanced Sensing, and the School of Chemistry and Physics, the University of Adelaide, South Australia (www.adelaide.edu.au) has combined suspended-core microstructured optical fibers (MOFs) with photoinduced electron transfer (PET) to demonstrate a…
Iron-based catalyst shows promise for alkene hydrosilylations
A catalyst in which iron atoms are complexed with the ligand pyridine diimine (PDI) has shown promise as a replacement for high-cost platinum-based catalysts for industrial olefin-hydrosilylation reactions. Developed by the research group of Paul Chirik at Princeton University (www.…
May Chementator briefs
Double-effect coating Researchers at the Leibniz-Instutut für Neue Materialien GmbH (INM; Saarbrücken, Germany; www.inm-gmbh.de) have developed a nanocomposite coating that simultaneously protects against corrosion while having lubrication properties similar to grease and oil. The new material is suitable for coating…
Integrated energy-efficient design boosts aromatics production
A Samsung petrochemicals facility in South Korea will be the first to feature a suite of energy efficiency technologies developed by UOP LLC (Des Plaines, Ill., www.uop.com) for improved aromatics production. A number of UOP aromatics-processing design features and materials…
This new PET process eliminates production steps
A new process for generating sheets of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) eliminates several production steps used in the traditional process, offering greatly reduced energy use and improved polymer properties. Developed by Octal Petrochemicals LLC FZC (Muscat, Oman; www.octal.com), the direct-to-sheet PET…
Drastically reduce energy consumption with exergy recuperation
A distillation process that consumes 85% less energy than traditional methods has been demonstrated by researchers from the University of Tokyo’s Institute of Industrial Science (www.energy.iis.u-tokyo.ac.jp) and Nippon Steel Engineering (NSE, both Tokyo, www.nsc-eng.co.jp). The technique, which involves the incorporation…