A new membrane technology for separating carbon dioxide from exhaust gas will be scaled up for real-world testing under a project to evaluate low-cost CO2 capture at a coal-fired power plant. Design and testing of an engineering-scale CO2-capture system will…
Late last November, the energy-transition start-up company Lumenion GmbH (Berlin, Germany; www.lumenion.com) received the 2020 Berlin Brandenburg Innovation Prize for its high-temperature, steel-based energy-storage technology. The system stores peaks of wind and solar energy by heating a steel core to…
A groundbreaking artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm, dubbed CAMEO (Closed-Loop Autonomous System for Materials Exploration), rapidly identified a potentially useful new material — a germanium-antimony-tellurium alloy (Ge4Sb6Te7) that is optimized for phase-change applications in data storage and photonic-switching devices. Tasked with…
Typically, the production of fuel-grade chemicals, such as butanol, from biomass fermentation processes involves low-yield batch processes and high energy costs. Now, researchers from Imperial College London (ICL; www.imperial.ac.uk), in partnership with bp plc (London; www.bp.com), have demonstrated a new…
MDI Production Late last year, Covestro AG (Leverkusen, Germany; www.covestro.com) started up a pilot plant for the production of methylene diphenyl diisocyanate (MDI) based on the innovative AdiP (adiabatic-isothermal phosgenation) technology at its Brunsbüttel site. The new technology promises to…
Site commissioning is underway at a facility in Nebraska that uses plasma pyrolysis to generate hydrogen gas and carbon black from natural gas without any local carbon dioxide emissions. The developer, Monolith Materials (Lincoln, Neb.; www.monolithmaterials.com), scaled up the process…
A new rejuvenator technology aims to improve the chemistry and service life of recycled asphalt pavement (RAP). The Invigorate additive, developed by Colorbiotics (Ames, Iowa; www.colorbiotics.com) based on Iowa State University research (www.iastate.edu), helps overcome issues with asphaltene aggregation and…
A new project in Canada will build a pilot facility to demonstrate a carbon-neutral production strategy for battery-grade graphite materials. Nouveau Monde Graphite (Saint-Michel-des-Saints, Québec, Canada; www.nouveaumonde.ca) has signed an agreement with Olin Corp. (Clayton, Mo.; www.olin.com) to construct two…
DESALINATION The challenge for large-scale desalination is to improve the performance of membranes used for reverse osmosis. One promising method is to introduce artificial water channels (AWCs) into synthetic membranes, to imitate the aquaporins of biological proteins for transporting water.…
The cryptography working group within the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF; Fremont, Calif.; www.ieft.org) standards organization has chosen the CPace protocol — developed by Endress + Hauser AG (Reinach, Switzerland; www.endress.com) — as a recommended method for use in internet…