Chemical Engineering August 2022 - 8

the first quarter of 2024.
Peroxide-curable FKM rubbers
are key to many critical
performance applications in
industries from automotive
and aerospace, oil-andgas,
chemical processing,
to electronics and healthcare.
Typical components
include seals, gaskets, Orings
and hoses.
METHANOL
The European Union Innovation
Fund has selected
Project Air, a unique production
facility for sustainable
methanol in Stenungsund,
Sweden, as one of 17 largescale
green-technology
projects to be granted more
than €1.8 billion. Project Air,
which is a collaboration between
Perstorp AB (Malmö,
Sweden; www.perstorp.
com), Fortum Oy (Espoo,
Finland; www.fortum.com)
and Uniper SE (Düsseldorf,
Germany; www.uniper.energy),
has applied for €97
million and the total investment
is expected to amount
to more than €230 million.
Project Air is based on
innovative usage of existing
technology in a largescale
industrial application.
To produce sustainable
methanol, the facility utilizes
significant amounts of CO2
and other residue streams
recovered from Perstorp's
ongoing operations, biogas
from new dedicated plants
together with hydrogen
from a new large electrolysis
plant. Further, existing
wastewater treatment will
be utilized as feed water for
the electrolysis. All electrical
energy for the combined
project will be renewable
based. Large-scale production
is slated for 2026.
Project Air will be built at
Perstorp's existing facilities
in Stenungsund, strengthening
the regional chemicals
industry cluster, Hållbar
Kemi 2030. The sustainable
methanol from Project
Air will be used to produce
chemical products.
ALGAE OIL
To save the world's fish
stocks and oceans, scien(Continues
on p. 10)
8
Upcycling of waste ABS into
3D-printable material with enhanced properties
I
n an advancement toward circularity for
commodity plastics, researchers at the
Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL;
Oak Ridge, Tenn.; www.ornl.gov) have
developed a method for upcycling the
commodity thermoplastic acrylonitrile butadiene
styrene (ABS) into an ABS-vitrimer
material that can be used in fused-filament
fabrication (FFF), a popular 3D-printing
technique. When used in 3D printing,
the resulting material produces stronger,
tougher and more solvent-resistant threedimensional
components (photo) that are
themselves easily recyclable.
" We need fundamental discoveries to
overcome the challenges of increased
costs and deteriorating material properties
associated with recycling, " says Tomonori
Saito, ORNL researcher and corresponding
author on the study. " Our goal
was to develop an easily adoptable strategy
that reuses plastic waste to create a
more valuable material instead of generating
fresh plastic. "
ABS is used in a wide range of enduse
products, including automobile components,
table-tennis balls, and LEGO
blocks. Led by Saito, the ORNL team
generated ABS-vitrimers by implementing
thiol-ene " click " chemistry to functionalize
butadiene segments with cysteamine,
followed by reacting with a short-chain
dialdehyde (glutaraldehyde) to produce
ABS-vitrimer.
Vitrimers feature networks of dynamic
covalent bonds that can undergo thermally
activated bond-exchange reactions.
They exhibit mechanical robustness and
chemical resistance because of their covalent
network formation, but vitrimers can
also be malleable by reconfiguring reversible
cross-links through the associative
bond exchange at elevated temperature,
making it recyclable, the ORNL team says.
The ABS-vitrimers also have added solvent
resistance, which enables their easy
separation from mixed, unsorted plastic
waste commonly encountered in recycling
scenarios. The team dissolved mixed plastic
waste in various solvents, and in each
experiment, upcycled ABS maintained its
structure, while all other plastics, including
ABS, completely dissolved.
The researchers expect that the value-enhancing
recycling process for the ABS-vitrimers
will also reduce CO2-equivalent emissions
by 65% compared to incineration.
ORNL
Extending the operating temperature of
biological phosphorus removal
enhanced
C
urrently,
biological
phosphorus removal (EBPR) techniques
in municipal wastewatertreatment
plants (WWTPs) do not
work well at temperatures above 25°C,
which is common in warm countries. This
limitation is expected to extend to more
countries with the advent of global warming.
To " future-proof " phosphorus removal,
scientists from the Singapore Center for
Environmental Life Sciences Engineering
(SCELSE; www.scelse.sg), Nanyang
Technological University (NTU), Singapore
and the National University of Singapore,
have developed a technique that removes
phosphorus from WWTPs at temperatures
of 30-35°C. The method, described
in a recent issue of Water Research, is
based on the bacterial genus Candidatus
Accumulibacter, which accumulate phosphorus
from wastewater and store it as
polyphosphate granules.
In the study, two laboratory-scale sequencing
batch reactors (SBRs) were
operated in parallel at 30°C and 35°C,
respectively, for over 300 days. " Employing
a slow-feeding strategy and sufficiently
high carbon input into biological reactors,
we effectively limited the carbon uptake
rates of competing bacteria. This allowed
Accumulibacter to flourish and benefited
a stable and efficient process, representing
basic conditions suitable for future fullscale
treatment plants, " says NTU professor
Stefan Wuertz, deputy center director
of SCELSE, who led the study.
Unlike other P-removal methods, the
SCELSE-developed method does not involve
chemicals, such as iron and aluminum
coagulants. These methods produce
a large volume of inert sludge that needs to
be treated and disposed of afterwards.
CHEMICAL ENGINEERING WWW.CHEMENGONLINE.COM
AUGUST 2022
http://www.ornl.gov http://www.perstorp.com http://www.perstorp.com http://www.fortum.com http://www.uniper.energy http://www.uniper.energy http://www.scelse.sg http://WWW.CHEMENGONLINE.COM
Chemical Engineering August 2022

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