New CU-Boulder technique could slash energy used to produce many plastics
2015-04-14
(Press-News.org) April 14, 2015 A new material developed at the University of Colorado Boulder could radically reduce the energy needed to produce a wide variety of plastic products, from grocery bags and cling wrap to replacement hips and bulletproof vests.
Approximately 80 million metric tons of polyethylene is produced globally each year, making it the most common plastic in the world. An essential building block for manufacturing polyethylene is ethylene, which must be separated from a nearly identical chemical, ethane, before it can be captured and used.
The similarities between ethylene and ethane have made the purification process difficult and costly. Today, an extremely energy-intensive distillation technique is typically used.
In a new study recently published in the journal Angewandte Chemie International Edition, a team of CU-Boulder researchers demonstrates that a new material made of molecules containing silver ions could vastly reduce the amount of energy needed to separate ethylene and ethane.
"This silver ion can be thought of as working like a hand," said Matthew Cowan, a CU-Boulder postdoctoral researcher and lead author of the paper. "This 'hand' can tell the difference between ethylene and ethane and it 'grabs' the ethylene out of the mixture. When all the ethylene has been grabbed, the ethane is removed and the hand releases the ethylene."
The new material--which has 13 times more separating power than previous materials used to separate ethylene and ethane--requires much less energy than the traditional distillation technique. In the United States alone, it now takes more than 46 million megawatt-hours of electricity a year to produce ethylene, about the same amount of energy produced by seven average-sized nuclear power plants.
Despite their potential for saving energy, silver ions can be more sensitive to contaminants, a problem that would have to be addressed before the technique could be commercially viable. The gas mixtures of ethylene and ethane are a byproduct from petroleum refineries, and they can contain impurities that could deactivate the silver ion "hands." But researchers are hopeful that the molecule they are packaging the silver ions into may be able to protect them from contaminants.
INFORMATION:
Other co-authors of the paper are William McDanel, Hans Funke, Yuki Kohno, Douglas Gin and Richard Noble, all of the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering in CU-Boulder's College of Engineering and Applied Science.
Funding for the research was provided in part by the Membrane Applied Science and Technology Center.
-CU- Contact:
Jim Scott, CU-Boulder media relations, 303-492-6431
Jim.Scott@colorado.edu
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
2015-04-14
Researchers from the RIKEN Center for Emergent Matter Science in Japan have uncovered the first evidence of an unusual quantum phenomenon--the integer quantum Hall effect--in a new type of film, called a 3D topological insulator. In doing this, they demonstrated that "surface Dirac states"--a particular form of massless electrons--are quantized in these materials, meaning that they only take on certain discrete values. These discoveries could help move science forward toward the goal of dissipationless electronics--electronic devices that can operate without producing the ...
2015-04-14
SAN DIEGO (April 14, 2015) -- A team of biologists from San Diego State University has developed a platform for identifying drugs that could prove to be effective against a variety of viral diseases. In a pair of recent articles in the Journal of Biomolecular Screening and the Journal of Visualized Experiments, the researchers describe how the methodology works, using dengue virus as an example, and they identify a novel drug which may someday be used to combat the disease.
Over the past several years, the researchers, led by SDSU biologist Roland Wolkowicz, have been ...
2015-04-14
Research from The University of Manchester using cutting edge computer analysis reveals that despite mutating, Ebola hasn't evolved to become deadlier since the first outbreak 40 years ago.
The surprising results demonstrate that whilst a high number of genetic changes have been recorded in the virus, it hasn't changed at a functional level to become more or less virulent.
The findings, published in the journal Virology, demonstrate that the much higher death toll during the current outbreak, with the figure at nearly 10,500, isn't due to mutations/evolution making ...
2015-04-14
Physicists from ITMO University, Ioffe Institute and Australian National University managed to make homogenous cylindrical objects completely invisible in the microwave range. Contrary to the now prevailing notion of invisibility that relies on metamaterial coatings, the scientists achieved the result using a homogenous object without any additional coating layers. The method is based on a new understanding of electromagnetic wave scattering. The results of the study were published in Scientific Reports.
The scientists studied light scattering from a glass cylinder filled ...
2015-04-14
The number of children being diagnosed with type 1 diabetes is increasing 3-4% every year and more so in school-aged children. Treating the condition is complex and poor management can often lead to medical emergencies that result in hospitalisation, placing ever greater demands on health services.
To improve the efficiency of these services and reduce potentially unnecessary admissions, researchers wanted find out how often children with type 1 diabetes are admitted to hospital compared with children of the same age, gender and socioeconomic class, living in the same ...
2015-04-14
The amount of government money pumped into dementia and stroke research in the UK has risen significantly in recent years, but it is still way too low when compared with the economic and personal impact these conditions have, finds a study published in the online journal BMJ Open.
The researchers assessed central government and charity research expenditure in 2012 into the UK's leading causes of death and disability: cancer, coronary heart disease, dementia and stroke.
In 2012, all four conditions accounted for over half (55%) of all UK deaths and for 5.5 million disability ...
2015-04-14
Children with type 1diabetes run almost five times the risk of being admitted to hospital for any reason as their peers, finds research published in the online journal BMJ Open.
Pre-schoolers and those from disadvantaged backgrounds are most at risk, the findings indicate.
The number of new cases of childhood type 1 diabetes has been rising steadily by around 3-4% a year, the evidence shows, and the risk of death among those with the condition under the age of 30 is nine times that of the general public.
The researchers analysed the causes of hospital admission after ...
2015-04-14
A new type of technology that senses minute changes in the levels of particular compounds in exhaled breath, accurately identifies high risk changes which herald the development of stomach cancer, reveals research published online in the journal Gut.
The findings prompt the researchers to suggest that the technology--known as nanoarray analysis--could be used not only to test for the presence of stomach cancer, but also to monitor those at high risk of subsequently developing the disease.
Gastric cancer develops in a series of well-defined steps, but there's currently ...
2015-04-14
1. Task Force weighs evidence on diabetes screening
Researchers for the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) have completed a systematic evidence review to inform an upcoming update of Task Force recommendations on screening asymptomatic, nonpregnant adults for type 2 diabetes. The review is published in Annals of Internal Medicine .
Approximately 21 million persons in the U.S. received a diabetes diagnosis in 2010 and an estimated 8 million cases went undiagnosed. Screening asymptomatic persons for diabetes may lead to earlier identification and earlier ...
2015-04-14
While a debate was raging between scientists and government regulators on how best to explain to patients the risks of participating in clinical research studies that compare standardized treatments, a team of bioethicists boldly went where no experts had gone before -- to the public.
What the respondents said surprised them: Keep it simple, but always ask permission, even when the research only involves gathering data from anonymized medical records.
"We didn't anticipate that people would want to grant permission for medical record searches, a research method that ...
LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:
[Press-News.org] New CU-Boulder technique could slash energy used to produce many plastics
