Year-round Wrap-up: Innovations Paving New Path for Chemicals

TAGS:  Sustainability / Natural Solutions     Polymer Reinforcement     Science-based Formulation     PVC, Plasticizers and Sustainability    

Several path-breaking research conducted throughout the year have paved a new path for chemicals and the chemical industry altogether. Major innovations have been seen in the areas of sustainability and recycling that would further help the chemical industries to incorporate the strategies in their developmental processes in order to make the entire value chain more sustainable in the forthcoming years.

As a year-round wrap-up here are the key innovations of 2022 that have changed the way of looking at things.

Chemical Production from CO₂

Researchers Develop New Tech to Affordably Convert CO₂ Into Valuable Chemicals

New technology developed at the University of Waterloo can make a significant difference in the fight against climate change by affordably converting harmful carbon dioxide (CO₂) into fuels and other valuable chemicals on an industrial scale.

Outlined in a study published in the journal Nature Energy, the system yields 10 times more carbon monoxide (CO) – which can be used to make ethanol, methane and other desirable substances – than existing, small-scale technologies now limited to testing in laboratories.

Researchers Create Fumarate from CO₂ by Artificial Photosynthesis

Researchers from Osaka Metropolitan University have managed to create fumarate using artificial photosynthesis on pyruvate and CO₂. In plants, natural photosynthesis binds carbon dioxide (CO₂) to organic compounds, which can then be converted into glucose or starch. These useful molecules can be sequestered, storing the carbon in a solid form.

Artificial photosynthesis mimics this process by reducing the greenhouse gas CO₂—the main cause of climate change—which is converted into other useful substances.

Rutgers & RenewCO₂ Enter Partnership to Convert CO₂ Into Monomers

Rutgers Innovation Ventures executes an exclusive license between Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey and the startup RenewCO₂. RenewCO₂‘s goal is to develop clean electrochemical processes that convert CO₂ into monomers and other organic chemicals to shift the chemical industry from a greenhouse gas emitter to a consumer of carbon dioxide.

Different from traditional fossil-derived feedstocks and current bio-to-plastics processes, the company’s process is carbon negative. Prior to facilitating the exclusive license for RenewCO₂, and while the technology was incubating in a Rutgers lab, Innovation Ventures helped develop an intellectual property strategy in close collaboration with the innovators.

Worms-inspired Recycling

Research Shows Plastic-munching Superworms Enable Polystyrene Recycling

A species of worm with an appetite for polystyrene could be the key to plastic recycling on a mass scale. Researchers at the University of Queensland have discovered the common Zophobas morio ‘superworm’ can eat through polystyrene, thanks to a bacterial enzyme in their gut.

The researchers used a technique called metagenomics to find several encoded enzymes with the ability to degrade polystyrene and styrene. The long-term goal is to engineer enzymes to degrade plastic waste in recycling plants through mechanical shredding, followed by enzymatic biodegradation.

New Research Shows Waxworm's Saliva Degrades Polyethylene

A team of researchers from the CSIC has discovered that the saliva of the waxworm degrades plastic, which could have numerous applications in the treatment or recycling of plastic waste.

The team discovered in 2017 that this species of worm (Lepidoptera Galleria mellonella) is capable of breaking down plastic (polyethylene), and now they have discovered it does so with their saliva containing enzymes (from the phenol oxidase family) that initiates.

Graphene-related Innovations

Researchers Fabricate Free-standing 2D Graphene Using Plasma Technology

A team of researchers (Elena Tatarova, Júlio Henriques, Luís Lemos Alves and Bruno Gonçalves) of the Plasma Engineering Laboratory of group N-PRiME with Instituto de Plasmas e Fusão Nuclear develop a process to fabricate free-standing graphene using plasma technology, at much lower production cost than the other existing market solutions.

They are granted by the US Patent Office the first international patent on the “Process, reactor and system for fabrication of free-standing two-dimensional nanostructures using plasma technology”.

Researchers Assess Single-layer Graphene Uniformity Using Raman Spectroscopy

Researchers from Graphene Flagship partner RWTH Aachen University and the Graphene Flagship Standardization Committee have pushed through a new IEC standard for assessing the strain uniformity of single-layer graphene using Raman spectroscopy.

The method used to measure graphene’s flatness is Raman spectroscopy, a standard tool of graphene research. This technique is fast, non-destructive and well understood, especially if the sample under evaluation consists of single-layer graphene.

Scientists Use Machine-learning to Streamline Graphene Synthesis Process

Rice University scientists are using machine-learning techniques to streamline the process of synthesizing graphene from waste through flash Joule heating.

The process discovered two years ago by the Rice lab of chemist James Tour has expanded beyond making graphene from various carbon sources to extracting other materials like metals from urban waste, with the promise of more environmentally friendly recycling to come.

New Ways of Monomer Synthesis

Scientists Use Light & Water to Produce Ethylene for Plastics

Northwestern University chemists have taken inspiration from plants to revolutionize the way an important industrial chemical is made. In a first for the field, the Northwestern team used light and water to convert acetylene into ethylene, a widely used, highly valuable chemical that is a key ingredient in plastics.

While this conversion typically requires high temperatures and pressures, flammable hydrogen and expensive metals to drive the reaction, Northwestern’s photosynthesis-like process is much less expensive and less energy intensive.

New Machine-learning Method Based on Learnable Grammar to Synthesize Monomers

Researchers have been trying to train a machine-learning model on a few existing chemical samples and then allow it to produce as many manufacturable molecules of the same class as possible, with predictable physical properties. If all these components are available, new molecules with optimal properties can be built.

Researchers at MIT and IBM tackles this problem using a generative graph model to build new synthesizable molecules within the same chemical class as their training data.

Other Key Innovations

Researchers Design Iron Catalyst to Make Olefin Metathesis More Eco-friendly

Researchers design a catalyst made of a much more abundant metal—iron to facilitate an important chemical reaction, the olefin metathesis reaction. Their work was published recently in Nature Catalysis.

“The olefin metathesis reaction is among the most widely applicable catalytic reactions for carbon-carbon double bond formation,” explained Satoshi Takebayashi, a researcher at the Okinawa Instiute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST) who was involved in the work. “Carbon-carbon double bonds are an important bond found in many chemical products.”

Researchers Modify Catalysts to Convert Non-edible Plants to Chemicals

Researchers in the Catalysis Center for Energy Innovation (CCEI) at the University of Delaware have investigated the dynamic nature of metal-metal oxide catalysts and come up with a strategy to improve, by nearly an order of magnitude, their performance for the conversion of non-edible plants to renewable fuels, chemicals, and plastics.

Through teamwork, they uncovered the dynamic nature of active sites and, by identifying the telltale signs of their dynamics, were able establish, for the first time, a robust model to predict their behavior in various working environments.

Researchers Use Spectroscopy & ML to Identify Plasticizers in PVC

New research use non-destructive spectroscopic analysis combined with Machine Learning (ML) to obtain rapid information on the identity and content of plasticizers in PVC objects of heritage value.

For the first time, a large and diverse collection of more than 100 PVC objects in different degradation stages and of diverse chemical compositions were analysed by chromatographic and spectroscopic techniques to create a dataset used to construct classification and regression models.

Source: Curated by SpecialChem