Chemical Engineering August 2022 - 6

nounced their collaboration
in the full-scale
technology assessment
of the new phosphorus
recovery technology
ViviMag. ViviMag is a
patented technology to
recover phosphorus and
other valuable resources,
such as iron, from sewage
sludge. The technology
has been developed
by Wetsus (Leeuwarden,
the Netherlands; www.
wetus.nl), the European
center of excellence for
sustainable water technology,
and Technical
University Delft (www.
tudelft.nl), in cooperation
with Kemira, several
other private companies
and municipal water
companies.
Kemira Oyj and Veolia
Wasser Deutschland will
conduct the first ViviMag
industrial pilot trial at the
wastewater
treatment
plant of Schönebeck,
Germany, during the second
half of 2022.
FLUOROELASTOMERS
Solvay S.A. (Brussels,
Belgium) recently introduced
a new portfolio of
high-performance
Tecnoflon
peroxide curable
fluoroelastomers
(FKM)
produced without the
use of fluorosurfactants
- a type of per- and polyfluoroalkyl
substances
(PFAS)
used as process
aids. The proprietary new
technology, called NFS
(non-fluorosurfactant),
marks a breakthrough in
FKM polymerization and
aligns with the company's
sustainability
roadmap
Solvay One Planet as Solvay
is setting the direction
for the fluoropolymers industry
to a more sustainable
economy.
Last month, Solvay
started the mass sampling
of the new Tecnoflon
peroxide curable
grades to allow the market
to test and adopt the
NFS technology before
the global roll-out of the
new portfolio. The company
aims to transition
Tecnoflon FKM to NFS by
(Continues on p. 8)
6
CHEMICAL ENGINEERING WWW.CHEMENGONLINE.COM
AUGUST 2022
A more-sensitive way to
differentiate chiral compounds
C
Scherrer
ircular dichroism (CD) is the established
method for distinguishing
between enantiomers - the optical
isomers of molecules that are mirror
images of each other. In this approach, circularly
polarized light is passed through the
sample and is absorbed differently by the enantiomers.
Although CD is widely used in analytical
chemistry, in biochemical research, and
in the pharmaceutical and food industries, the
signals are very weak: the light absorption of
two enantiomers differs by just under 0.1%.
There are various strategies for amplifying the
signals, but these are only suitable if the sample
is available in the gas phase. Most studies
in chemistry and biochemistry, however, are
carried out in liquid solutions.
Now, Swiss researchers from the Paul
Institute (PSI; Villigen; www.psi.
ch), EPF Lausanne (www.epfl.ch) and the
University of Geneva (www.unige.ch) have
demonstrated a new method, which was
reported in a recent issue of Nature Photonics.
The new method exploits so-called
helical dichroism (HD), which relies
on the shape (helical) of the
radiation's wavefront, rather than
its polarization.
At the Swiss Light Source (SLS)
at PSI, the researchers were able,
for the first time, to show that enL
Paul
Scherrer Institute
Commercial debut for sand-based energy storage
Polar Night Energy
Energy
Consumption
Electricity
Excess energy
Heat
Heat Storage
ing cold air through the piping, and then the
heated air can be used to convert water to
process steam or to heat district-heating
water in an air-to-water heat exchanger.
The use of sand is said to be an effective
solution for reducing CO2 emissions.
According to a 2020 report by Mission Innovation
(http://mission-innovation.net),
sand-based high-temperature energy storage
could save more than 100 million metric
tons of CO2 equivalents (CO2e). Saved
emissions would be around 3% of the current
emissions of the whole E.U., the company
says.
antiomers can also be distinguished from
each other using helical X-ray light. At the
cSAXS beamline of SLS, they demonstrated
this on a sample of the chiral metal complex
iron-tris-bipyridine in powdered form (diagram).
The signal they obtained was several
orders of magnitude stronger than what can
be achieved with CD. HD can also be used in
liquid solutions and thus fulfills the prerequisite
for applications in chemical analysis. The
ability to distinguish enantiomers is also an
important tool when separating them.
The researchers were able to create light
with the desired properties with spiral-zone
plates, diffractive X-ray lenses through which
the X-rays pass before hitting the sample.
" With the spiral zone plates, we were able,
in a very elegant way, to give our X-ray light
the desired shape and thus an orbital angular
momentum. The beams we create in
this way are also referred to as optical vortices, "
says PSI researcher Benedikt Rösner,
who designed and fabricated the spiral zone
plates for this experiment.
ast month, operation began at
Polar Night Energy Oy's (Tampere,
Finland; www.polarnight
energy.com) first commercial
sand-based thermal-energy storage
system. The thermal storage system,
which is located at the Vatajankoski
power plant, is now producing lowemission
district heating to the city of
Kankaanpää in Western Finland. The
unit has a heating power of 100 kW and
an energy-storage capacity of 8 MWh.
The storage system is an insulated
steel tank (4-m wide and 7-m tall) that contains
100 tons of sand, and a network of
pipes. Additional equipment, such as automation
components, valves and fan and
a heat exchanger (or steam generator), are
located outside. The operating principle is
very simple: electricity is converted to heat
by an electrical-resistance heater that heats
air in a closed-loop piping system. When
the hot air is circulated through the storage,
the heat is transferred to the sand.
The sand can be heated to temperatures
of 500-600°C, and stored for long periods
of time. The storage is unloaded by blowreflection
symmetry
https://www.wetsus.nl/ http://www.tudelft.nl http://www.psi.ch http://www.epfl.ch https://www.psi.ch/en http://www.unige.ch https://polarnightenergy.fi/ https://polarnightenergy.fi/ http://www.mission-innovation.net http://WWW.CHEMENGONLINE.COM
Chemical Engineering August 2022

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Chemical Engineering August 2022
