How Soap was Born: From Mud and Urine to Modern Detergents
Martin Pitt comes clean about the history of soap
Features
My Chemical Engineering Hero is: Martin Ruhemann
Adrian Finn remembers Martin Ruhemann, a man who overcame extraordinary adversity to shape the fu...
Microplastics Explainer
MICROPLASTICS are being found across the world and even in our bodies. Want to know what they are...
Distillation Improvement Opportunities Part 6: Safety Implications from New Technologies
Roger Stokes and Michael Moosemiller outline the safety issues associated with conventional disti...
Distillation Improvement Opportunities Part 5: Optimisation and Control – An Industrial View
Doug White reviews the control and optimisation issues affecting typical existing distillation ...
Distillation Improvement Opportunities Part 4: Hybrid Schemes and Analysis
Izak Nieuwoudt reviews the hybrid schemes that can help process engineers reduce the energy use o...
Waste Away
Adam Duckett on our plastic plight and the efforts of engineers
Distillation Improvement Opportunities Part 3: Improvements Through the Use of Novel Mass Transfer Internals
The push for fewer emissions and greater profitability are driving the development of more effici...
Distillation Improvement Opportunities Part 2: Improvements Through the Use of Dividing Wall Columns
Dividing wall columns promise significant energy and cost savings compared to multiple binary dis...
The Rise of AI
Adam Duckett on the rise of artificial intelligence
CO2 Capture: Putting the Sea into CCS
Amanda Jasi and Kerry Hebden talk to companies developing technologies to capture CO2 from the ocean
Distillation Improvement Opportunities Part 1: Introduction - Your Greener Prospects
Daniel Summers introduces a new series calling on chemical engineers to take advantage of opportu...
Our Research Focus: Securing the future of water
Kariappa Karumbaiah explains how Hydroxsys hopes to place innovative membrane technology at the...
Wastewater Treatment: When Renting Might be the Better Option
Plant operators are increasingly looking at ways to improve the efficiency and reliability of the...
Chemical Looping Diversity: Biofuels, Power, CCS and Chemicals
Adam Duckett and Amanda Jasi speak to engineers who are developing a variety of chemical looping ...
A Virtuous Circle: Chemical Looping has Solid Potential for Optimising Processes
Ben Anthony and Paul Fennell explore the advantages of chemical looping and call on governments t...
Pore Performance: One 3D-printing firm's ambition to re-engineer membranes
Adam Duckett interviews Tom Pugh and Andrew Walker about Evove’s push to improve separations
Our Research Focus: Déjà Vu
Humbul Suleman and Rizwan Nasir ask if VHS tapes can help to develop better membranes for CO2 rem...
IChemE releases ChERD Centenary Special
In a centenary special issue of the journal Chemical Engineering Research and Design, experts off...
Book Review: Natural Polymers-Based Green Adsorbents for Water Treatment
Editor: Susheel Kalia; ISBN: 9780128205419; Elsevier; 2021; €152.60
Brine to batteries: lithium extraction technology that’s sustainable and efficient
Amanda Doyle speaks to Teague Egan and Amit Patwardhan of clean technology company EnergyX about ...
Clean Steam: Greener distillation processes
Brian Williamson and Chris Jackson talk to Adam Duckett about zero emission closed-loop steam
Nitrate: An Emerging Solution
Jonathan Wright and colleagues explain how their IChemE Award-winning ion exchange and encapsul...
Are You Ready for Digital?
The new digital age in our workplace isn’t coming, it’s already here, says Craig Smith
Separation Anxiety
Darren Broom discusses the need for new developments to address the challenges around multicompon...
A Life in Lithium
The future of energy needs chemical engineers, and lots of them, say Jacob Brown, Titi Oliyide, L...
Attractive Solutions
Alessandro Viola explains how magnets can filter out metal particle contamination in pharmaceutic...
Trapping a Slippery Foe
Alfonso Rodriguez and Charlie Espinosa explain innovations to map and remove mercury contaminatio...
Catapulting the Hydrogen Economy: Catalytic Membrane Reactors
Humbul Suleman and colleagues explain how refinements to a decades-old technology can provide cle...
Producing Hydrogen While Storing CO2 in the Oceans
Mike Kelland and Greg Rau talk to Amanda Doyle about their clean-tech goals
From Wastewater to Resource
Khor Bee Chin discusses plans to reclaim precious resources from the wastewater that goes down th...
Book Review: Analysis and Design of Membrane Process: A Systems Approach
Mingheng Li; ISBN: 9780735421813; AIP Publishing; 2020; US$135
Reducing the Daily Grind
Liza Forbes, Kym Runge, Mike Mankosa, Jaisen Kohmuench and Luke Vollert discuss a froth-free flot...
Making the Change
Barry Perlmutter advises on transitioning from batch to continuous
Bulk Solids Handling: Perspective on a Professional Blind Spot
A topic often overlooked and misunderstood, Grant Wellwood looks at the prevalence of bulk solids...
Separations under Control
Barry Perlmutter explains developments in containment for eliminating worker exposure during soli...
First Steps
Mark Yates charts the development of Apollo’s portable life support system
A Clean Bill of Health
James Finn describes the development of an award-winning setup for sterile filtration of APIs
Ditch the Bag Filters
Barry Perlmutter explains automated clarification technologies
Monodispersion at Scale
Micropore Technologies, a specialist engineering company, has successfully scaled up membrane tec...
Producing Graphene at Scale
The challenge for chemical engineers of producing graphene at scale
Filtration – The Forgotten Process
Filtration is often overlooked during the development of new processes, but at what cost?
Nereda: Redefining Effluent Treatment
There is a new player in the wastewater process sector, re-writing the rules of the game
Csaba Horváth – Degrees of Separation
Claudia Flavell-While explores the contribution of separation scientist Csaba Horváth
Solar-Powered Water Purification Wins Top Prize
Helen Tunnicliffe reviews the winners of IChemE’s annual awards programme
CCS: Carbon Capture and Strategy
Helen Tunnicliffe goes on safari in Norway to learn about a government-backed scheme to set up ...
In Orbit
Astronaut Donald Pettit talks to Adam Duckett about his life and work
News
Fake lily pads could be second Sun for lithium manufacturers
A TRIAL to boost critical minerals production has shown that fake plastic lily pads could be a se...
Engineers say artificial reefs could filter microplastics from the sea
WHAT if we could build artificial coral reefs to filter microplastics from the sea? That’s a poss...
Taking the P out of pee
ENGINEERS at the University of Surrey are investigating how phosphorous can be filtered from huma...
Engineers urge UK action on sewage to guard against sickness outbreaks
IMMEDIATE action to bolster maintenance of the sewage system and sensors to allow real-time monit...
Mammoth undertaking: Climeworks starts up world’s largest direct air capture plant
THE world’s largest direct air capture (DAC) plant – Mammoth – has started operations in Iceland ...
Australian minerals and hydrogen research gets A$59m funding boost
A FLOATING device that uses sunlight to produce hydrogen from wastewater and a leaching process a...
Boston Metals’ electrified process starts extracting valuable metals from mining slag
A PILOT plant that recovers metals from mining waste has started operations in Brazil, as develop...
Water scarcity competition offers US$119m incentive to rethink desalination
XPRIZE has launched a five-year competition aimed at improving large-scale clean water access.
UK lithium boost as engineers use membranes to extract lithium from brine
ENGINEERS have piloted a process that uses membranes to produce battery grade lithium carbonate f...
Engineering options that can prevent sewer overflows
WITH industry forced to apologise for dumping untreated sewage into rivers, changes upstream incl...
ChemEngDayUK: Preparing to deliver sustainability
HELD for the first time in Northern Ireland, and hosted by Queen’s University Belfast, this year’...
Sizewell C looks at capturing CO2 from the atmosphere using nuclear heat
SIZEWELL C, in the UK, is developing plans to demonstrate how heat from a nuclear plant could be ...
Sulzer builds separation technology R&D centre in Singapore
SULZER is building a new research centre for its separation technologies in Singapore as it seeks...
Darrell Patterson awarded Bath’s first ever posthumous professorship
DARRELL PATTERSON is the first person to be awarded a posthumous professorship by the UK’s Univer...
Chemical engineers work to create hydrogen from steel sludge
CHEMICAL engineers from Imperial College London have joined forces with the UK’s Materials Proces...
UK set to host rare earths processing hub in push for cleantech security
THE UK is set to host a new US$195m rare earth processing hub that Pensana is building at the Sal...
Plant-based alternative to plastic microbeads set for scaleup
ENGINEERS have received funding to scale up a technology that produces sustainable alternatives t...
Andrew Livingston elected to the Royal Society
ANDREW LIVINGSTON, Professor of Chemical Engineering at Queen Mary University of London, has been...
Santos greenlights Australia’s largest oil and gas investment in close to a decade
SANTOS has sanctioned a US$3.6bn investment in the Barossa gas project off Australia’s Northern T...
Covestro pilots chemicals recycling process to close loop on used mattress foam
COVESTRO has begun to pilot a chemical process to recycle the foam from used mattresses. If succe...
Researchers look to recover waste anaesthetics
A TEAM of chemical engineers and doctors are developing a new membrane to capture and reuse anaes...
Micropore Technologies partners with South Korean pharmaceutical company
MICROPORE Technologies has announced a licence agreement for its membrane technology with South K...
Researchers to develop carbon-negative power plant
RESEARCHERS at the University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, US have received just over US$800,000 ...
Novel membrane for crude oil fractionation
AN INTERNATIONAL research team has developed new membrane technology that could reduce carbon emi...
Ronald Hughes, 1928–2020
Obituary of Ronald Hughes, an influential catalysis researcher
Vale to invest in technology to reduce dam use and increase safety
BRAZILIAN mining giant Vale is to invest in technology to reduce tailings dam use and increase op...
MOF captures and converts NO2 into useful product
A METAL-organic framework (MOF) developed at the University of Manchester, UK is capable of selec...
Novel material for reversible SO2 capture
AN international team of scientists has developed a novel material capable of selective and rever...
Upcycling plastic bottles for the chemical industry
RESEARCHERS at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), Saudi Arabia have ...
Cheap catalyst for hydrogen production shows commercial-scale promise
RESEARCHERS have shown for the first time that a cheap catalyst can be used to split water for hy...
Simple method improves membrane CO2 separation performance
AN international team of researchers has, for the first time, shown that the carbon dioxide (CO2)...
Rejigged rigs could kickstart North Sea CCS, study finds
USING North Sea oil rigs to generate power from methane and bury the resulting emissions would be...
Membrane for low-energy chemical separation
A METAL oxide-infused membrane has been developed that offers lower-energy chemical separation th...
Australia investigates building its largest hydrogen production plant
QUEENSLAND Government-owned power generation company Stanwell is spending A$5m (US$3.4m) to study...
Gorgon CCS plant starts up after two-year delay
CHEVRON’S US$54bn Gorgon LNG project has started operation of one of the world’s largest carbon c...
New reactor can produce pure stream of hydrogen
A CHEMICAL reactor has been designed that can produce hydrogen as a pure product stream.
Aramco awards US$18bn in contracts to expand oil and gas production
SAUDI ARAMCO has awarded contracts worth US$18bn to build process plants and expand oil productio...
New approach for desalinating hypersaline brines
USING a temperature-dependent solvent to desalinate water with high concentrations of dissolved s...
Researchers achieve commercially attractive carbon capture with a MOF
CHEMICAL engineers at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EFPL), Switzerland have, for ...
New plastic can be recycled repeatedly
SCIENTISTS at the US Department of Energy’s (DOE) Lawrence Berkley National Laboratory (LBNL) hav...
Cattle feed and dye membranes win MIT water prize
ENTREPRENEURS who are developing process technologies to remove dyes from industrial wastewater a...
Sunfire and Salzgitter to build world’s most powerful steam electrolysis plant
TECHNOLOGY company Sunfire, the Salzgitter Group, and their international partners are to build t...
Creating useful products from desalination waste
ENGINEERS at MIT, US have proposed a method that could use desalination waste to produce useful c...
An alternative CO2 capture process
SCIENTISTS at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), US have developed ...
Report identifies challenges towards a plastics circular economy
THE European Technology Platform for Sustainable Chemistry (SusChem) has released a report identi...
Drax declares world-first carbon capture at biomass power plant
THE UK’s DRAX power station has begun capturing carbon, and has described the development as the ...
Fatal dam breach in Brazil leaves hundreds missing
A TAILINGS dam in Brazil has collapsed, leaving a reported 16 people dead and 297 missing. Other ...
3D-printed sponge could reduce side effects of chemotherapy
CHEMICAL engineers at the University of California (UC), Berkeley, US, have developed a 3D-printe...
Shell to invest in Shearwater gas infrastructure hub
SHELL and its partners ExxonMobil and BP have announced a final investment decision (FID) for a S...
Novel particles for photocatalytic water treatment
RESEARCHERS at Rice University, US, have developed novel micrometre-sized, titanium dioxide (TiO2...
Recycling mixed plastics together
RESEARCHERS in the UK have undertaken a project which aims to develop new technologies for dealin...
New MOF makes plastic manufacturing more energy efficient
RESEARCHERS have developed a metal-organic framework (MOF) containing iron-peroxo (Fe2(O2)) sites...
A membrane technology breakthrough
RESEARCHERS from the Livingston Group at Imperial College London, UK, in collaboration with BP, h...
Consortium bails out Singapore water treatment firm Hyflux
TROUBLED Singapore water treatment firm Hyflux has been rescued by a S$530m (US$384m) investment ...
Smaller cheaper plants: Exxon and BASF tout improved gas-treating solvent
EXXONMOBIL and BASF are carrying out a full-scale commercial demonstration of a new gas-treating ...
Liquid membrane blocks small particles and lets big ones through
A SELF-HEALING liquid membrane has been developed that acts as a reverse filter by blocking small...
Pulling oil from water
ENGINEERS at Rice University, US, in conjunction with Shell Global Solutions, have developed magn...
Air Products to build a coal-to-syngas facility for Jiutai New Material
AIR Products, a world-leading industrial gases company, headquartered in Pennsylvania, US, has be...
Drax: Stepping closer to coal-free
DRAX, which operates the largest power station in the UK, and supplies 6% of the country’s energy...
Uranium: Under the sea
LCW Supercritical Technologies and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) have taken a mile...
Picky porous electrodes take out toxins
RESEARCHERS at Rice University, US, are developing a novel water treatment technology to selectiv...
CCS could fuel the fizz in UK lager
CARBON capture and storage (CCS) could fuel the fizz in UK lager and help guard against a future ...
New MOF membrane cuts energy use for petrochemical industry
AN ENERGY efficient separation method for propylene and propane has been developed using metal-or...
Carbon nanotubes could make carbon-zero fuels cheaper than fossil fuels
A BREAKTHROUGH has been made in the manufacturing of carbon nanotube membranes which will lead to...
Extracting lithium from water using synthetic membranes
A metal-organic framework (MOF) has been developed that can extract lithium from water, which cou...
World’s largest dynamic hydrogen electrolysis plant inaugurated
THE WORLD’S largest dynamic hydrogen electrolysis plant has been inaugurated in Germany, and has ...
First kerosene made from solar syngas
SYNGAS made from solar energy has been processed into kerosene for the first time, which research...
Keeping oil and water mixed for months
EMULSIONS that can stay stable for months have been created using a low-cost, low-energy process ...
2D materials with ‘smallest possible’ holes sieve salt from seawater
RESEARCHERS at the University of Manchester’s National Graphene Institute (NGI) have assembled me...
Removing silica from power plant water
COOLING tower water could be reused and recycled ten or more times by using a new silica-removing...
First liquid MOF described, retains porosity
NOVEL research has demonstrated that metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), commonly produced as fine p...
Wood digestion without enzymes
SUCCESSFULLY understanding the unique, non-enzymatic digestion of wood by a fungus has been descr...
Evonik and Sinopec partner on OSN
EVONIK and the SINOPEC Beijing Research Institute of the Chemical Industry (BRICI) have agreed to...
Funding to extract rare earths from coal
THE US Department of Energy (DOE) has awarded US$1m in funding to Penn State University and its i...
GTI will demo R-GAS gasification in China
GAS TECHNOLOGY INSTITUTE (GTI) in the US will be partnering with China’s Yangquan Coal Industry G...
