Chemical Engineering October 2020 - 8

stress remaining almost constant
at various temperatures.
" The discovery possesses
application for
widespread
outer-space exploration given
the large temperature fluctuations
that occur, " says Omori.
Also, " it can potentially be used
in tension braces in buildings
or column elements in bridges
- providing greater resistance
to earthquakes, " adds Omori.
A NEW NYLON
Toray Industries, Inc. (Tokyo,
Japan; www.toray.com) has
developed a new, more-sustainable
nylon trade-named
Ecodear. Ecodear Nylon is
60% bio-based, developed
with sebacic acid generated
from castor beans. The resulting
fiber, initially available in 10,
20- and 50-denier versions,
can be spun in the same process
as conventional nylon,
and can be used to make biobased
versions of the company's
brand technologies, such
as Dermizax and Entrant. Toray
plans to market the textile this
fall, targeting the active outdoor
sports and skiing markets, as
well as leisure markets. Toray
International America Inc. (New
York, N.Y.) will provide the new
textile in North America.
OXYGEN SCAVENGER
Equinor (Stavanger, Norway;
www.equinor.com) has worked
with Clariant Oil Services
(Houston; www.clariant.com)
to optimize the volume of the
oxygen scavenger being used
on the Norwegian offshore oil
platform, the Johan Sverdrup.
" As part of our optimization process,
our team took the existing
O2 remover being used by the
platform, Clariant's incumbent
product - a liquid-grade, sulfite-based
oxygen scavenger
- and looked at how we could
make it a more efficient product,
formulating a catalyzed
version, " says Jarle Skjold,
global corporate account manager
at Clariant Oil Services.
In field trials, the teams were
able to reduce the volume of
the O2 remover used. After replacing
the incumbent product
with the specially formulated
Clariant replacement product,
the installation was able to
achieve significant cost savings
of around $800,000/yr, as
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8
CHEMICAL ENGINEERING WWW.CHEMENGONLINE.COM OCTOBER 2020
Graphene-POSS polymer additives enable
lightweighting
M
ITO Material Solutions (Indianapolis,
Ind.; www.mitomaterials.
com) has developed a proprietary
graphene-functionalization
technique that produces unique strengthenhancing
additives for a wide variety of
polymers and composites. The additives
significantly improve mechanical properties
(including tensile strength, flexural modulus
and others) of the plastics and composites,
allowing manufacturers to replace metals
in a range of applications requiring high
strength and light weight.
The additives are a class of modifiable
compounds that combine polyhedral oligomeric
silsesquioxane (POSS) - a siliconoxide
molecule with organic functional
groups that was previously developed by
Hybrid Plastics (Hattiesburg, Miss.; www.
hybridplastics.com) - with either graphene-oxide
(GO), a two-dimensional hexagonal
lattice of carbon with oxygen functionalization
on the edges, or starch. The
combined graphene-POSS additive, known
as E-GO, is the company's first product
and is now available for user testing. Other
products are in development.
A major advantage of E-GO is its ability
to mitigate dispersion-related problems,
such as settling and agglomeration. The
E-GO additive alleviates these shortfalls
" by providing the proper interlayer spacing
within the GO platelets, while providing the
proper reactionary sites via our production
processes, " explains MITO co-founder and
CEO Haley Keith.
To manufacture the additives, MITO has
developed a robust, high-yield proprietary
process that was recently scaled from the
laboratory to a contract manufacturing facility.
The micron-scale powder additives are
then mixed into polymer resins, where they
reactively disperse into nanoscale particles
that increase strength properties. " Integrating
the highly dispersable additives into a
manufacturing process is very easy without
disrupting existing polymer processes, and it
only takes 0.1% by weight concentrations of
the additives to realize a significant improvement
in mechanical properties, " says MITO
chief engineer Kevin Keith, who founded the
company with his wife, the CEO.
MITO additives enhance fiber-reinforced
composites and thermoplastics from 30 to
135% beyond standard performance metrics,
the co-founders say.
In late August, MITO announced $1 million
in seed funding, led by two Chicago-based
firms, Dipalo Ventures and Clean Energy
Trust. The company is also supported by a
Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR)
grant from the National Science Foundation.
Single-atom thin platinum makes
a sensitive chemical sensor
B
oosting the sensitivity of solid-state
gas sensors is often achieved by
incorporating nanostructured materials
as the sensing element.
However, interfacial effects at nanoparticles,
grains or contacts can lead to nonlinear
responses, high electrical resistance
or electrical noise. A possible way to overcome
such drawbacks, using a one-atom
thin layer of platinum on silicon carbide, has
been reported by a team of researchers, led
by scientists at Chalmers University of Technology
(Gothenburg, Sweden; www.chalmers.se),
and recently published in Advanced
Material Interfaces.
These electrically continuous Pt layers are
prepared by physical vapor deposition on the
" carbon zero layer " (buffer layer) of silicon carbide.
The buffer layer is a graphene-like 2-D
electrical insulating layer grown epitaxially on
the silicon terminated face (0001) of 4H-SiC.
This layer enables the 2-D growth of Pt, and
also serves to detect the onset of electrical
conductivity of the surface as the metal deposits.
The 3-4-Å thin Pt layer is found to be
" super sensitive to its chemical environment, "
explains Kyung Ho Kim, postdoctoral fellow
at the Quantum Device Physics Laboratory
at the Dept. of Microtechnology and Nanoscience
at Chalmers, and lead author of the
article. " Its electrical resistance changes significantly
when it interacts with gases. "
" Atomically thin platinum could be useful for
ultra-sensitive and fast electrical detection of
chemicals. We have studied the case of platinum
in great detail, but other metals like palladium
produce similar results, " says associate
professor Samuel Lara Avila.
The researchers used the sensitive chemical-to-electrical
transduction capability of
atomically thin Pt to detect toxic gases at the
parts-per-billion level. They demonstrated
this with the detection of benzene, a compound
that is carcinogenic even at very small
concentrations, and for which no low-cost
detection apparatus exists. The 2D system
opens up a route for resilient and high-sensitivity
chemical detection and can be the path
for designing new heterogeneous catalysts
with superior activity and selectivity.
http://www.mitomaterials http://www.toray.com http://www.hybridplastics.com http://www.equinor.com http://www.clariant.com http://www.chalm http://www.ers.se http://WWW.CHEMENGONLINE.COM
Chemical Engineering October 2020

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Chemical Engineering October 2020
