Dow Expands Manufacturing Capacity of MBS-based Additives at Grangemouth, Scotland Facility

Dow Plastics Additives, a business unit of The Dow Chemical Company, announced the construction of additional equipment to both expand capacity and advance its technology at its Grangemouth, Scotland, manufacturing facility. The expansion will significantly increase the capacity of methyl-methacrylate butadiene styrene (MBS) based additives to better serve the growing demands of Dow’s global customer base. The expansion is expected to be fully operational during the fourth quarter of 2011.  

The additional capacity of MBS products in Grangemouth, Scotland demonstrates Dow’s commitment to investing in its downstream performance businesses. The facility will increase Dow’s capacity for MBS-based additives by 10,000 tons per year and serve customers globally.

“With this expansion, Dow is increasing not only the total capacity, but also the technical capabilities of the plant to produce the most sophisticated MBS products in the world for our customers,” said Ruby Chandy, managing director for Dow Plastics Additives, “and the timing of this capacity increase will help us keep pace with increasing global demand for quality MBS additives.”

 

Commissioning of first large-scale plant for climate-friendly chlorine production

 In March 2010 Uhde and Bayer MaterialScience signed a contract for the construction of a new chlorine plant at the Chempark Krefeld-Uerdingen site. This 20,000-tonne chlorine demonstration plant has now come on-stream. The oxygen-depolarised cathode used for this has been incorporated into the new single-element technology from Uhde/UHDENORA. With the introduction of this new industrial manufacturing process the two companies involved are hoping to significantly reduce energy consumption and CO2 emissions. The combination of the two technologies was developed at Bayer in Leverkusen over the past eight years. Provided the two-year large-scale trial is successful, Bayer will gradually switch its chlorine production to the new process. In addition, the companies also intend to offer the new technology on the global market from 2013 onwards. Major German chlorine producers have already announced their interest, as have a number of companies in the Asia/Pacific region.

”We are proud of our long partnership with Bayer MaterialScience,” said Alfred Hoffmann, Member of Uhde’s Executive Board. “As a technology-driven company we are always on the lookout for solutions that provide our customers and the market with economic and ecological benefits. This first-class, future-oriented technology has the potential to offer such a solution.”

”Improving energy efficiency in chemical production processes can considerably reduce electricity consumption in Germany and elsewhere in the world,” said Patrick Thomas, Chief Executive Officer Bayer MaterialScience.

Chlorine is an essential building block in today’s chemical industry. Electrochemical chlorine production is, however, one of the most energy-intensive processes in the entire sector. Chlorine is used for the production of plastics in particular and also for the manufacture of pharmaceuticals.

 

Chemical imaging of individual salt particles advances aerosol research

Scientists recently combined experimental approaches and molecular dynamics modeling to gain new insights into the internal structure of sea salt particles and relate it to their fundamental chemical reactivity in the atmosphere. They used laboratory-proxy sea salt composed of mixed sodium methanesulfonate and sodium chloride salts (CH3SO3Na/NaCl). Sea salt particles are emitted into the atmosphere by the action of ocean waves and bubble bursting at the ocean surface.

They are ubiquitous in the atmospheric environment. Airborne particles impact and drive atmospheric chemical reactions that are known to influence Earth’s radiative balance and thereby physico-chemical processes that impact air quality and climate change. Using molecular dynamics simulations and surface tension measurements, the research team assessed the surfactant properties of CH3SO3- ions and their surface accumulation in wet, deliquesced particles. They investigated the internal structure of dry CH3SO3Na/NaCl particles using a combination of experimental chemical imaging techniques: scanning electron microscopy X-ray microanalysis and time-of-flight secondary ion mass spectrometry at EMSL and synchrotron-based X-ray microspectroscopy at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

The results indicate that the surfaces of aqueous (deliquesced) sea salt particles contain a substantial number of CH3SO3 ions, while in the dry (effloresced) particles, methanesulfonate salts form a coating layer that modifies the particles’ ability to absorb atmospheric moisture and contribute to chemical reactions. This research shows that surface enhancement or depletion of chemical components in marine particles can occur because of the difference in the chemical nature of the species. Because the atmospheric chemistry of the salt particles takes place at the gas-particle interface, understanding their complex surfaces provides new insights about their effect on the environment and climate change.

More information: Liu Y, B Minofar, Y Desyaterik, E Dames, Z Zhu, JP Cain, RJ Hopkins, MK Gilles, H Wang, P Jungwirth, and A Laskin. 2011. “Internal Structure, Hygroscopic and Reactive Properties of Mixed Sodium Methanesulfonate-Sodium Chloride Particles.” Phys. Chem. Chem. Phys. DOI: 10.1039/c1cp20444k

Provided by Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory (news : web)

Scientists probe the energy transfer process in photosynthetic proteins

Researchers have developed a new method to probe the fundamental workings of photosynthesis. The new experimental technique could help scientists better understand the nitty-gritty details of nature's amazingly efficient sunlight-to-fuel conversion system.

Plants and other photosynthetic organisms grow by harvesting the sun's energy and storing it in chemical bonds. Antenna proteins, which are made up of multiple light-absorbing pigments, capture sunlight over a large surface area and then transfer the energy through a series of molecules to a reaction center where it kick-starts the process of building sugars. Photosynthetic processes take place is spaces so tightly packed with pigment molecules that strange quantum mechanical effects can come into play. When a pigment molecule absorbs light, one of its electrons is boosted into an "excited" higher energy state. If multiple pigments in a protein absorb light nearly simultaneously, their wave-like excitation states may overlap and become linked to one another, affecting the path of the energy transfer.

Researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, led by Graham Fleming, discovered they could test whether this overlap had occurred. The scientists excited a well-studied photosynthetic antenna protein, called Fenna-Matthews-Olson (FMO), with two different frequencies of laser-light. When the researchers used a third laser pulse to prompt the protein to release energy, they found it emitted different frequencies than those it had received, a sign that the two excitation states had linked. Alternative methods for observing overlapping excitations had been proposed before, but the new technique may be easier to implement since it relies only on frequency —or color—shifts, and not on precisely timed pulses.

"It is a relatively simple task to separate colors from each other," says team member Jahan Dawlaty, who also noted that the evidence of overlap was not hidden among other optical effects, as it might be when using a different technique. The team's results are published in the American Institute of Physics' Journal of Chemical Physics (JCP). The new method could be used to create a catalogue of the various excitation states in FMO and their potential combinations, the team says.

"The experiment is interesting and was carried out in a novel way," says Shaul Mukamel, a chemist at University of California, Irvine, who was not part of the research team. Mukamel noted that the technique might also be applied to larger complexes and reactions centers. Probing energy levels and pigment couplings in photosynthetic systems is essential to understanding, modeling, and testing the function of these systems, he says.

And, with better understanding, human engineers might one day be able to capitalize on the same energy conversion tactics that photosynthetic organisms have developed over billions of years, notes Ed Castner, editor of JCP and a chemist at Rutgers University in New Jersey.

"The annual total for human energy usage on our planet is roughly equivalent to the amount of light energy incident on the planet in a single hour," says Castner. "To address our needs for safe, sustainable and renewable fuels, it is clearly urgent to understand how photosynthesis works."

More information: J. Chem. Phys. 135, 044201 (2011); doi:10.1063/1.3607236

Provided by American Institute of Physics