Latest News: Technologies
Green honors
In June, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agancy (EPA; Washington, D.C.; www.epa.gov) announced the winners of the 2009 Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge Awards. Winners of the Challenge, which promotes R&D of less hazardous alternatives to existing technologies that reduce or eliminate…
Making SunCatchers instead of cars
Stirling Energy Systems (SES; Phoenix, Ariz.; www.stirlingenergy.com) and Tessera Solar (Houston; www.tesserasolar.com) recently unveiled four, newly designed solar-power collection dishes at Sandia National Laboratories’ National Solar Thermal Test Facility (Albuquerque, N.M.). The refined design of SunCatchers will be used in…
Capacity to double for an oil-shale process
Outotec GmbH (Oberursel, Germany), a 100% daughter company of Outotec Oy (Helsinki, Finland; www.outotec.com) has received a €109-million contract for the design, delivery, construction and commissioning of a new oil-shale processing plant to be built in Narva, Estonia for Eesti…
A gypsum-free, energy-saving route to lactic acid
Uhde GmbH (Dortmund, Germany; www.uhde.biz) is developing a new process for producing lactic acid (LA) — a monomer for making the biodegradable plastic polylactic acid (PLA) — that does not require a distillation step. As a result, savings in steam…
Making solar panels even greener
Last month, Malibu GmbH & Co, KG (Bielefeld, Germany; www.malibu-solar.de) started up a thin-film photovoltaic-module fabrication facility that is claimed to be the world’s first to eliminate the use of nitrogen trifluoride (NF3) — a greenhouse gas with a significant…
The missing piece for wireless process control
Last month, Honeywell Process Solutions (HPS; Phoenix, Ariz.; www.honeywell.com/ps) unveiled the process industry’s first redundant wireless system gateway (WSG), connecting the last major gap in the path to wireless process control. WSGs manage data between wireless field instrumentation and a…
New catalyst boosts liquid-fuel yield from heavy hydrocarbons
A new zeolite catalyst that increases yields of light cycle oil (LCO) from high molecular weight “bottoms” hydrocarbons in petroleum fluid catalytic cracking (FCC) units was commercialized last month by Grace-Davison, an operating segment of W.R. Grace & Co. (Columbia,…
Direct conversion of cellulose to HMF demonstrated
Researchers at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL; Richland, Wash.; www.pln.gov) have published the first direct route for converting plant cellulose to 5-hydroxymethylfurfural (HMF), a valuable platform chemical for the production of both plastics and biofuels. Appearing in the June issue…
A new support for biofilters
Researchers from the Environmental Biotechnology Cooperative Research Center (Sydney and Perth, Australia; www.ebcrc.com.au) have developed a new way to harness bacteria to biodegrade odor-causing substances. Traditional biofilters typically employ compost supported on wood chips to trap the odor-producing substances, and…
Using gold to catalyze oxidation reactions
Polymer-supported nanoclusters of gold have recently been shown to catalyze the oxidation of alcohols to ketones at room temperature in air by the research group of chemistry professor Shu Kobayashi, University of Tokyo (www.chem.s.u-tokyo.ac.jp), in a project supported by Japan…