Membrane bioreactors (MBRs) are widely used in wastewater treatment plants because they intensify the biotreatment process, reduce the number of processing stages, retain the biocatalyst and help remove the product from the suspended solids. In order to take advantage of…
A team of scientists in Kentucky are working to harness the unique material properties of diamonds — hardness, thermal conductivity, electrical resistivity and more — for advanced industrial applications, including biosensors and high-frequency and high-power devices. Kentucky Advanced Materials Manufacturing…
Perovskites are a class of synthetic materials that have a crystalline structure similar to that of the naturally occurring mineral calcium titanate. They have been the subject of many studies because they exhibit unique properties that can be tuned according…
Small-scale pilot testing has begun for a process that extracts nickel, manganese, cobalt and copper from nodules collected from the surface of the Pacific Ocean seafloor. Obtaining the metals from the seabed nodules has advantages over mining land-based ores because…
Harnessing its polymer technology and carbon-fiber expertise has enabled Toray Industries, Inc. (Tokyo, Japan; www.toray.com) to create a porous carbon fiber with uniformly continuous pores (diagram) — claimed to be a world’s first. Using this fiber as a support layer…
Hiroya Abe and colleagues at Tohoku University (Sendai, www.tohoku.ac.jp) and Hokkaido University have developed a method to fabricate a highly active catalyst electrode for performing the oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) in fuel cells and metal-air batteries. Currently, such fuel cells…
Dynamic Modifiers LLC (Atlanta, Ga.; www.dynamicmodifiers.com), a maker of custom polyolefin compounds, recently introduced PAL…VersaCHAR, a non-halogenated flame-retardant polymer designed to be molded over other materials. When exposed to flame, the formulation’s surface chars quickly, which prevents flame spread and…
An international team of researchers has developed metallic nanoparticles that imitate enzymes to convert carbon dioxide into ethanol and propanol, which are common raw materials for the chemical industry. The team includes professors Justin Gooding and Richard Tilley from the…
Researchers from the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (Singapore; https://smart.mit.edu) have discovered a way to study the properties of a nanoparticle without damaging it, which has not been possible so far. The work was led by Michael Strano, a…
Professor Monoj Kumar Mondal and Anuj Kumar Prajapati from the Dept. of Chemical Engineering and Technology, Indian Institute of Technology (Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, India; www.iitbhu.ac.in) have used nanoporous activated garlic stem carbon (AGSC) — prepared from garlic stem waste…