Chemical Engineering August 2013 - 13

Thin-film deposition
CHEMENTATOR
ast month, Southwest Research Institute
(SWRI; San Antonio, Tex.; www.
swri.org) was awarded $1.5 million by
the Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency (DARPA; Arlington, Va.;
www.darpa.mil) for a three-year project
to develop alternative technologies for
depositing thin films. The project is part
of DARPA's Local Control of Materials
(LoCo) program, which aims to overcome
the reliance on high-thermal-energy inputs
by examining the process of thinfilm
deposition at the molecular level in
areas including reactant flux, surface
L
mobility and reaction energy. The LoCo
program will try to develop low-temperature
deposition processes and a new
range of coating-substrate pairings to
improve the surface properties of rotor
blades, infrared missile domes, photovoltaics
and others.
The first year of the project will focus
on a proof-of-concept demonstration of
SWRI's HiPIPS (high-power impulse
plasma source), which provides a high
flux of reactive species to a surface, while
maintaining an overall low deposition
temperature. In subsequent years, the
project will integrate the plasma source
with other technologies, and more.
ETHYLENE IN FCC OFF-GAS
(Continued from p. 10)
The process obtains motor fuels from
ethylene in a two-step oligomerization.
First, the Ni converts ethylene to butanes
and hexenes, then the ASA finishes the
oligomerization to fuels. Process conditions
range from 200 to 400°C and 700
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to 1,100 psia, says Nicholas, " with gasoline
yield coming at lower temperature
and pressure than maximum distillate
yield. " The product is readily separated
from unconverted components in the
dry gas feed via a single boiling-point
column fractionation, due to the large
difference in molecular weight between
the product and the feed.
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Desalination
R
esearchers from the University of Texas
at Austin (www.utexas.edu) and the
University of Marburg (Germany; www.
uni-marburg.de) are developing a process,
called electrochemically mediated seawater
desalination, that promises to be
an inexpensive way to desalinate small
volumes of water. The patent-pending
method - described in the June issue
of Angewante Chemie - uses a plastic
chip with a branched microchannel. At
the junction of the branch, an embedded
electrode neutralizes some of the Cl- ions,
creating an ion-depletion zone, which increases
the local electric field compared to
the rest of the channel. The resulting electric-field
gradient redirects the salts into
one branch, allowing desalinated water to
pass through the other branch.
Startup company Okeanostech
(Union, Ky.; www.okeanostech.com) is
working to commercialize the technology
with its so-called WaterChip - a
solid-state, massively parallel desalination
(MPD) platform.
■
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Chemical Engineering August 2013

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Chemical Engineering August 2013