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Business News: March 2026
Plant Watch Solstice Advanced Materials to expand uranium conversion site in Illinois February 11, 2026 — Solstice Advanced Materials (Morris Plains, N.J.; www.solstice.com) has invested in debottlenecking projects at its facility in Metropolis Works, Ill., resulting in a production expansion…
Thermal management system for data centers boosts cooling efficiency and shrinks footprint
Fast-growing power densities within the server racks at new data centers often generate enough heat to quickly overwhelm legacy air- and liquid-cooling methods, and managing the thermal load is becoming a constraint for the data-center infrastructure that supports AI. A…
Focus On: Solids-Handling Equipment
This vacuum system empties containers and minimizes dust The Pneumati-Con ® dilute phase vacuum conveying system (photo) is designed to facilitate dust-free manual dumping and the conveying of materials from small bags or sacks. Additionally, it includes the ability to…
Organic flow-battery electrolyte powered by a supramolecular “handshake”
Flow batteries have been widely deployed in large-scale energy-storage applications in recent years, but the low energy density and high cost of the incumbent vanadium electrolyte limit the long-term return on investment of such systems. A new organic redox flow-battery…
Pilot plant launched for process that makes lime sustainably from industrial waste
Calcining limestone (CaCO3) to produce lime (CaO) is a key industrial process for making cement, steel and chemicals, among other uses. Lime production is a target for CO2-abatement efforts because it generates a great deal of CO2 emissions, not only…
Scale-Up Considerations for New Technologies
Scaling up new technologies is a strategic challenge requiring foresight and disciplined execution. Success demands designing pilot plants with scalability in mind. Applying a set of principles outlined here can reduce risk, improve investor confidence and enhance the likelihood of…
Drive to Zero Process Safety: Mapping Cultural Risk Factors
Proactive culture evaluation closes the gap between root causes and cultural factors to promote sustainable safety leadership while also preventing recurring accidents and chronic incidents Incident investigations commonly show that human factors have led to process safety issues. Yet, despite…
Can We Skip Pilot and Demonstration Studies?
When scaling up from laboratory experiments to full-scale production, there are a strong set of reasons for constructing intermediate pilot-scale plants, but there are also some scale-up situations where it may pay off to skip the pilot studies Pilot-plant studies…
Porous electrodes enable high-pressure electrolysis
Much hydrogen produced via water electrolysis (“green” hydrogen) requires downstream compression for end use or storage. A new electrolyzer concept developed by Supercritical Solutions Ltd. (London; www.supercritical.solutions) produces high-pressure hydrogen using a membraneless technology. “Supercritical’s technology outputs hydrogen at pressures…
Editor Commentary: Inflection point for interoperability
The idea of vendor-neutral industrial control systems built on open standards that allow for interoperability among hardware and software components has been swirling within the industrial automation industry for the past 12 years, but progress toward this objective to date…