Production of industrial chemicals has long relied on petroleum-based starting material. As reserves of fossil carbon dwindle, a new approach is looking to microorganisms and their ability to convert ...
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Plastics are the most widely used materials in the United States, surpassing steel, copper and aluminum combined by volume. While ubiquitous, fossil-based plastics are becoming more and more costly to...
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Several techniques exist for turning plastic into goods and packaging. Microcellular foams are of particular interest because they can be used to produce strong, lightweight plastic. Unfortunately, du...
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Enantiomers are pairs of compounds that have the same chemical formula but different spatial structures (like your left and right hand, they are non-superimposable mirror images of each other). This i...
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The sugars found in biomass can be treated with solvent and converted into many important building block chemicals. One such chemical is 5-hydroxymethylfurfural (HMF), which is used to make plastic ma...
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Polymer brushes are a broad class of materials made of polymer chains tethered at one end to a substrate. These brushes are able to tune and modify surface properties like bioadhesion and wettability....
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Block copolymers (BCPs) self-assemble into well-defined, highly regular and dense nanostructures. Such BCP arrays are useful for fabricating electronic devices like magnetic storage media, quantum dot...
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The lithographic process is one of the most powerful technologies of the digital electronics era. Lithography allows hundreds of millions of components to be fabricated on a single chip with pattern f...
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Microcellular injection molding produces lightweight, dimensionally stable plastic components using fewer raw materials than standard techniques.The process, also known as ‘microcellular foaming,’...
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Disulfide bonds between cysteine residues are the most common crosslinking agents in proteins. Reducing these bonds is an ordinary procedure in biochemistry and biotechnology. The most commonly used r...
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Batteries can be classified as primary (nonreusable) or secondary (rechargeable). The demand for rechargeable batteries of high energy density and specific energy has surged along with portable electr...
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Common biodegradable polymers such as poly(lactide) and poly (3-hydroxyalkanaoates) are derived from relatively expensive chemical feedstocks and have low melt stability. This presents a challenge for...
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Degradable polyelectrolytes are useful materials for a variety of biological applications, from implant coatings and immunostimulants to therapeutic and gene delivery. Many of these applications rely ...
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Lignin is a major component of non-edible biomass (15-30 percent by weight; 40 percent by energy). It is a cheap byproduct of pulp and biofuel production and is one of the few naturally occurring sour...
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Polymer-based micropellets can be formed having diameters smaller than 50 microns. The miniscule particles are vital to a number of processes like laser sintering—used to build rapid prototypes and ...
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Polymer-based pellets are utilized in plastics manufacturing. In particular, very small micropellets and powders are in special demand for processes like selective laser sintering (SLS), which require...
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Aqueous lyotropic liquid crystal (LLC) assemblies are useful for highly selective chemical separations, such as water desalination and selective ion-transporting membranes. LLCs are formed in water wh...
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Advanced metal alloys with high strength and fracture toughness are used in an increasing number of applications. However, some metal alloys like Al-Cu have been underutilized due to poor weldability....
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Medical isotopes are valuable healthcare tools for patient imaging and disease treatment. Yet most radioisotopes used in medicine are produced in nuclear reactors, which are complex, generate high vol...
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Many pharmaceuticals and other biologically active molecules contain chemical sequences called triads that are challenging to prepare in the laboratory. Specifically, triads are three or more contiguo...
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Immiscible alloys are composed of materials that meld together above a certain temperature but become unstable and separate as the solution cools. For example, elements like bismuth or tin may coagula...
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In chemical manufacturing, a production system may receive and process raw materials in multiple steps, with each step or task associated with a certain procedure or tool. Ideally, each step is schedu...
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In 2008, coal-fired power plants generated 49 percent of electricity consumed in the U.S., more than twice that of any other energy resource. Coal is an important fossil fuel because world coal reser...
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Beyond its fuel potential, biomass is poised to supplant nonrenewable sources in the production of important building block chemicals. One such intermediary is 5-hydroxymethylfurfural (HMF), a primary...
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Attention and investment increasingly look to renewable resources like sugars as foundations for the practical, chemical needs of industry. Diones are such compounds, vital to many processes includin...
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