Latest news about engineering

Allentown, Pa.-based industrial gas supplier Air Products and Chemicals and Arlington, Va., power utility company AES Corp. announced plans to jointly spend $4 billion on a “mega-scale” green hydrogen plant they would build in north Texas.

The Wilbarger County facility would be the largest in the U.S. to manufacture green hydrogen, with electrolyzers able to produce more than 220 tons per day, the companies say. The plant would also include on-site wind and solar power generation with an installed capacity of about 1.4 GW...

LG Chem will start building the plant in the first quarter of 2023 and aims to launch commercial production by the end of 2025, expanding its output capacity to 120,000 t/yr by 2027 by installing additional production lines. The capacity can supply up to 1.2mn high-performance EVs, LG Chem said on 22 November.

The plant is to completely operate on renewable energy and smart technologies for a more sustainable and efficient production process. LG Chem said that the plant will not only help it meet rising demand for battery cathodes from the EV sector, but address regulatory-related supply risks such as the Inflation Reduction Act in the US...

Sites in England and Wales have been identified as potential locations for Rolls-Royce SMR’s small modular reactors.

The company said that this is the first phase in a programme of work considering siting, collaboration opportunities and the socio-economic benefits of deploying Rolls-Royce SMR units on land within the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) estate, with other UK locations also being evaluated.

The work is consistent with NDA’s aim of cleaning up the UK’s earliest nuclear sites and releasing them for uses that benefit local communities and the environment...

Developed at Rice University in Houston, Texas, flash Joule heating was initially developed to produce graphene from carbon sources including waste food and plastic but has since been adapted to recover rhodium, palladium, gold and silver for reuse. A report in Nature Communications by the Rice lab of chemist James Tour shows that highly toxic heavy metals including chromium, arsenic, cadmium, mercury and lead are removed from the flashed materials, leaving a by-product with minimal metal content.

Instantly heating the waste to 3,400 Kelvin (5,660 degrees Fahrenheit) with a jolt of electricity vaporises the precious metals, and the gases are vented away for separation, storage or disposal. Tour said that with more than 40 million tons of e-waste produced globally every year, there is plenty of potential for “urban mining.”...

Following the commissioning of the world’s largest off-grid solar-battery hybrid system for the mining industry, at the Fekola gold mine, in Mali, expectations to reduce the mine’s heavy fuel oil consumption by over 13-million litres a year and to lower carbon dioxide emissions by an estimated 39 000 t/y have already been exceeded, Suntrace business development and sales manager Ralf Jungebloed tells Mining Weekly.

German renewable energy company Suntrace, together with Canada-based gold mining company B2Gold, in April completed commissioning of the hybrid system. The solar-battery hybrid plant was integrated and commissioned successfully with the existing power plant operation...

HybroHeat furnace technology combines the advantages of cost-efficient preheating of log material in a gas furnace and precise temperature setting by means of induction technology before extruding the billet. The concept is based on proven technologies from SMS group in which it joins efficient gas furnaces and saws with high-performance induction plants in a single line.

This is one of the many ways that SMS group guarantees extrusion press operators a competent technology partner for complete production lines up to the finished profile. SMS group supplies extrusion presses with a press force from 10 MN to 160 MN, both as direct or indirect front loader, as well as tube press, or as a combination of all these extrusion methods. Profiles and tubes from aluminium alloys produced on extrusion presses of SMS group are normally used in the automotive, aerospace and construction industries...

Last month, South African Refrigeration and Air Conditioning Contractors Association (Saracca) released its updated training manual, which will be implemented, from this month onwards, by heating, ventilation, air-conditioning and refrigeration (HVAC-R) training providers throughout South Africa.

Saracca director Barney Richardson tells Engineering News that the new manual is part of the association’s continuous efforts to maintain skills levels in the HVAC-R sector. “The skills level of installers directly impacts the quality and compliance of air conditioning, refrigeration units, cold rooms/freezers and large cold stores being installed in South Africa,” he says...

Industry leaders from companies including Airbus, AMRC, IBM, McLaren, Rolls-Royce and many more will share their expert advice about their role in addressing some of society’s most pressing challenges at the Engineering Design Show (Coventry Building Society Arena, Coventry, 19-20 October).

The EDS 2021 conference agenda has been exclusively curated by three market-leading engineering journals: Eureka, New Electronics and – brand new for this year – The Engineer. Each will have its own conference stream at the event. In addition, the show will see the launch of The Springboard, which aims to encourage engineering start-ups and entrepreneurs. Supported by British luxury automotive supercar maker McLaren Automotive, The Springboard awards will give early-stage companies a platform to share their innovations with thousands of engineering professionals with the power to influence and guide them to future success and to enter an award to win a free stand at next year’s show, as well as PR and marketing support, together worth £10,000...

A soft, stretchable device that converts movement into electricity in dry and wet environments could have applications in marine environments, claim researchers at North Carolina State University.

“Mechanical energy – such as the kinetic energy of wind, waves, body movement and vibrations from motors – is abundant,” said Michael Dickey, corresponding author of a paper on the work and Camille & Henry Dreyfus Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at NC State. “We have created a device that can turn this type of mechanical motion into electricity. And one of its remarkable attributes is that it works perfectly well underwater.” The heart of the energy harvester is a liquid metal alloy of gallium and indium that is encased in a hydrogel...

Hydrogen is set to have biggest impact in the transportation sector, say readers of The Engineer In its recently published hydrogen strategy the UK government took the first steps towards delivering on a promise to put hydrogen at the heart of the UK’s net zero plans.

As previously reported, hydrogen is thought to represent a particularly promising component of the net zero push because of its potential application in so many different sectors. And in a recent poll we asked readers of The Engineer where they thought it would have the most significant impact: transportation, heavy industry, or heating...