An effort is underway to establish an environmentally friendly supply of rare-earth elements (REEs) from waste streams in the U.S. The project, undertaken by American Resources Corp. (Fishers, Ind.; www.americanresourcescorp.com), is focused on re-positioning assets from the coal industry to…
Conventional propane dehydrogenation (PDH) is an endothermic, equilibrium-limited reaction that requires high temperatures to achieve commercially viable per-pass yields of propylene. Oxidative propane dehydrogenation has the potential to form propylene at much lower temperatures and more selectively by controlling the…
Last month, Amarillo Gold Corp. (Toronto, Canada; www.amarillogold.com) selected Metso Outotec’s (Helsinki, Finland; www.mogroup.com) modular FIT Station for its Posse Gold greenfield mining project in the state of Goiás in central Brazil. This will be the first commercial installation of…
L-Alanine DMC Biotechnologies, Inc. (DMC; Boulder, Colo.; www.dmcbio.com) has successfully demonstrated full commercial scale (85 m3) fermentation for its first product, the amino acid L-alanine. The scaleup results identically tracked the performance at bench and pilot scales, further validating the…
Atomic-layer deposition (ALD), a surface engineering technique that applies layers of coatings in a conformal way at single-atom thicknesses, is being investigated for its potential to improve the selectivity and durability of industrial catalysts under a U.S. Dept. of Energy…
Researchers at the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology (Empa; Dübendorf; www.empa.ch) and ETH Zurich (both Switzerland; www.ethz.ch) have made wood compressible and turned it into a piezoelectric generator. The research, reported last month in the journal Science…
Bühler AG (Uzwil, Switzerland; www.buhlergroup.com) is making a major step towards digitally connected rice mills of the future. The first rollout for integrated rice mills is entering the final stages, with the initial setup using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine…
As application demands evolve, battery materials have gotten more complex, incorporating not only lithium, but higher nickel, manganese and cobalt content, while also including various dopants like aluminum or zirconium and stabilizing coatings. Processing all of these disparate components into…
U.S. Vanadium LLC (Hot Springs, Ark.; www.usvanadium.com) has successfully demonstrated the ability to recycle the liquid electrolyte used in vanadium redox-flow batteries (VRFB), a rapidly growing commercial technology that promises to enable intermittent renewable energy technologies, such as solar and…
A closed-loop, long-duration energy-storage system (diagram) developed by Malta, Inc. (Cambridge, Mass.; www.maltainc.com) could provide a carbon-neutral path to industrial heating. “One of the exciting facets of this technology is that it generates a lot of discharge heat. When we…