Artificial photosynthesis systems seek to harvest sunlight and carbon dioxide to make fuels. Among the many challenges for making solar fuels has been achieving a fast flow of protons from where they are generated to where they combine with CO2…
Scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL; Upton, N.Y.; www.bnl.gov) and the University of Delaware (Newark; www.udel.edu) have designed a catalyst capable of selectively removing oxygen atoms from the side chain of an aromatic compound without affecting the ring. The team…
Lithium is a key raw material for batteries that power electric vehicles, portable electronics and more, but traditional methods for obtaining it are plagued by poor lithium recovery (a large portion of Li is lost in the recovery process), slow…
Li2CO3 from brine Purities of greater than 99.9% for battery-quality lithium carbonate have been achieved using a proprietary artificial-intelligence-powered crystallization technology developed by Standard Lithium Ltd. (Vancouver, B.C.; www.standardlithium.com). The total cation contaminant levels were reduced from nearly 2,500 parts…
Anellotech (Pearl River, N.Y.; www.anellotech.com) recently announced a successful laboratory demonstration of a process to convert mixed plastic waste into a host of useful starting materials for new plastics. The process (diagram), known as Plas-T-Cat, would take place in a…
An international team, led by Mahdokht Shaibani from Monash University (Melbourne, Australia; www.monash.edu), has developed an ultra-high capacity lithium-sulfur battery with better performance and lower environmental impact than current Li-ion batteries. The team includes people from Monash University, University of…
Everactive (Charlottesville, Va.; www.everactive.com) has just launched its Machine Health Monitor (MHM) product for batteryless vibration and temperature sensing of process machinery (photo). The MHM harvests waste energy from small temperature differentials (10°F or greater) and ambient light (100 lux…
An alternative method for processing mixed nickel-cobalt hydroxide precipitate to separate the nickel from cobalt and manganese has been proposed by a team from the Bandung Institute of Technology (Bandung, Indonesia; www.itb.ac.id), the Indonesian Institute of Sciences (Bandung) and the…
Researchers from Indonesia’s Bogor Agricultural University (Bogor, Indonesia; www.ipb.ac.id), the University of Bath (U.K.; www.bath.ac.uk), and the University of Johannesburg (Johannesburg, South Africa; www.uj.ac.za), led by Budi Riza Putra, have developed a low-cost, low-energy and low-maintenance, solar-powered desalination system that…
Researchers from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST; Daejeon; www.kaist.ac.kr) have developed a three-dimensional (3D) hierarchically porous nanostructured catalyst that is said to have a CO2-to-CO conversion rate up to 3.96 times higher than that of conventional…