Efforts to find more environmentally friendly anti-scalant approaches have yielded a new form of functionalized nanocellulose that can prevent the nucleation and growth of calcium carbonate, the most common component of industrial scale. Based on the biopolymer cellulose, the anti-scaling…
Last month, construction began on a demonstration facility that integrates high-performance entrained-flow gasification technology and Fischer-Tropsch (F-T) synthesis for making jet fuel from woody biomass. The demonstration project is being carried out by a Japanese consortium, led by Mitsubishi Hitachi…
Plastic-bottle waste is toxic and non-biodegradable, and has become a major environmental issue. It often ends up in the oceans, affecting marine life, or in landfills, contaminating groundwater and affecting land use. Now a team led by professors Nhan Phan-Thien…
A team from the University of Kentucky (Lexington, Ky.; www.uky.edu) and Virginia Polytechnic Institute (Blacksburg, Va.; www.vt.edu) has set up a novel pilot plant to recover rare-earth elements (REEs) from coal-based sources, aiming to produce high-grade REE concentrates from coal-based…
A research team from the University of New South Wales (Sydney, Australia; www.unsw.edu.au) and Ruhr-Universität Bochum (Bochum, Germany; www.ruhr-universität-bochum.de) has succeeded in transferring structural characteristics of natural enzymes to metallic nanoparticles, achieving high catalytic activity. In the case of enzymes,…
The increased demand for lithium in recent years — driven mainly by battery manufacturing — has broadened the scope of lithium-processing technologies. Typically, lithium is mined from spodumene ore or sourced from brine deposits, but a new process enables lithium’s…
Flame-spray pyrolysis (FSP) is a type of aerosol synthesis in which solid particles condense from the vapor phase after the combustion of droplets of solution. FSP has been used to produce industrially important nanoscale solids, such as fumed silica, alloy…
Commercial Debut The world’s first commercial plant based on the patented PLAneo technology of thyssenkrupp Industrial Solutions AG (Essen, Germany; www.thyssenkrupp-industrial-solutions.com) recently started production in Changchun, China. Operated by the Jilin COFCO Biomaterial Corp., the new plant produces all standard…
Today, all commercial lithium is sourced from ores or brines on land, where the total lithium reserves amount to 14 million tons. In contrast, the oceans contain 230 billion tons of lithium, although the lithium concentration in seawater is very…
Current oil-water separation technologies, such as centrifugation, filtration, dissolved air flotation, distillation, oil skinners, adsorption and electrochemical methods, are of low efficiency and consume a lot of energy during complex separation processes. Mesh membranes have attracted much interest lately, and…