Recent Patents on Chemical Engineering - Volume 6, Issue 1, 2013

Bimetallic nanoparticles have been recently used for heterogeneous and electrochemical catalysts. Carbon nanotubes are promising support for the catalysts because of their excellent chemical stability, large surface area and good thermal and electrical conductivities. This work briefly summarizes recent results published in literature and patents for the synthesis and applications of carbon nanotube-supported PtRu bimetallic catalysts.

This review examines recent patents and research articles in autothermal reforming (ATR) of fossil fuels like gasoline, diesel, JP-8 along with renewable fuels such as methanol, ethanol, glycerol, butanol, bio-oils and biodiesel into H2 gas. The focus of the research was the recent developments in terms of ATR reformer design, ATR fuel processors, reformer start up, and reforming catalysts to determine the opportunities for R&D in this area. The production of H2 by ATR of fossil fuels has been widely investigated; several catalytic studies based on various noble and non-precious metals like Rh and Ni are available, restricting new investigations. In contrast, H2 production from bio feedstock like bio-oils, biodiesel, ethanol, and butanol are very recent and offer considerable room for further investigation.

The Baeyer-villiger reaction has aroused a considerable amount interest in synthetic organic chemistry as a powerful tool for such purpose as the preparation of natural products, pharmaceutical intermediates and monomers for polymerization processes. With further research on this reaction, the types of catalysts are increasing continuously. This review provides an overview of the latest achievements of Baeyer-Villiger reaction on homogeneous reaction, heterogeneous reaction, biocatalysis reaction, with an emphasis on the clarification of the relationship between catalysts and substrates in different catalyst systems. The mechanisms of the reaction are summarized, and the future advance of Baeyer- Villiger reaction is prospected.

In order to realize the sustainable development of chemical industry, the treatment and reclamation of the industrial waste effluent become more and more urgent. In view of many contaminants in the wastewater produced by the relevant industrial scenario, such as seawater desalination, paper-making industry, leather industry, organic synthesis industry, food processing industry, surface treatment industry, hydrometallurgy, etc., are ionic substances, the versatile electrodialysis technology has found its applications in the treatment and reclamation of industrial wastewaters. In this article, the relevant developments reported recently in the open literatures, especially in the patents, were reviewed and understood from different aspects, such as wide applied fields, multi-level treating results, diversiform treating methods and so on. Furthermore, some potential requirements in this field were also put forward tentatively.

Nanocrystalline films of TiO2 and TiO2:SiO2 with high photocatalytic activity were prepared on glass substrates by the application of sol-gel method. Then the films were subjected to a high temperature treatment at 500°C, which resulted in growth of TiO2 crystals. Afterwards the TiO2:SiO2 films were in contact with an aqueous solution (10 mg.L-1) of methyl orange (MO) and irradiated under UV. The resulted films showed a high photocatalytic activity. In the current study the photocatalytic activity of TiO2 crystals was studied by an Artificial Neural Network (ANN). This was achieved by predicting the concentration of MO in various values of SiO2 concentration and time of degradation. In order to perform the modeling, Multi-layer Perceptron (MLP) network was used in this work, with its learning algorithm being Levenberg-Marquardt (LM). The outcome of modeling showed that there was an excellent agreement between the results of simulation and the data obtained from the experiments. It is worth noting that in the current work, the methods applied in recent papers and patents for the preparation of nanocrystalline films and determination of their photocatalytic performance and also modeling of such processes have been studied.