Introducing the I&ECR Special Issue 2024 Industrial Research─From the Lab to Commercialization

Abstract

As the third longest published journal in the ACS portfolio, Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research (I&ECR) has been the leading choice for articles in the broad fields of applied chemistry and chemical engineering for 115 years. Initially, almost all articles in the journal were industrially authored. I&ECR retains today a strong publication rate of industrially affiliated basic and applied research we recognize here. We are delighted to release “2024 Industrial Research: From Lab to Commercialization” as a Special Issue (SI) (https://pubs.acs.org/page/iecred/vi/industry-research-2024). In this SI, I&ECR has gathered contributions from a global group of researchers across a diverse range of topics seeking to advance the translation of fundamental science from lab to commercialization. The articles selected for this SI highlight the contributions of industrial researchers to the development of new technology and applications for commercial and potentially commercial products. This collection gathers articles from across the globe and from across the subject/topic areas published by I&ECR: Reviews; Applied Research and Development; Kinetics, Catalysis, and Reaction Engineering; Materials and Interfaces; Process Systems Engineering; Separations; and Thermodynamics, Transport, and Fluid Mechanics. Lohr and co-workers at Shell in Houston and Amsterdam contributed a review on the production of ethylene oxide, highlighting catalyst and process development success stories leading to the commercial production of this important chemical by epoxidation of ethylene. (1) In the Applied Chemistry section, Taiwan-based researchers Yang and co-workers describe the synthesis of polyurethanes via ring-opening of cyclic carbonates using ionic liquid catalysts such as tetrabutyl ammonium acetate. (2) This pathway provides a potential route to nonisocyanate polyurethanes (NIPUs) as a method of improving the sustainability of this important polymer class; the study was partially funded by the Chang Chun Plastics group. Several articles in the SI cover the topics of Kinetics, Catalysis, and Reaction Engineering. These include Genomatica-funded work by Meyer and co-workers at Iowa State on the scaleup of nylons. (3) Their work utilizes a two-stage polyamidation process to prepare quantities of polymer sufficient to obtain rheology and other required data, thereby decreasing one of the significant roadblocks associated with developing new industrially relevant polyamides. Brauer and co-workers from the University of Minnesota and Låkril Technologies worked out the reaction kinetics of the autocatalytic hydrolyses of aqueous alkyl lactates, showing that the reaction sequence of lactate hydrolysis is described in three kinetic stages: initiation/neutral hydrolysis, autocatalytic hydrolysis, and equilibrium and that a dual kinetic regime best describes the observed hydrolysis behavior. (4) Ganguly and colleagues at the Indian Institute of Petroleum (CSIR-IIP) and Bharat Petroleum Corporation Limited (BPCL) described the innovation, scaleup, and commercialization of a new sulfonamide-based catalyst trademarked as Thoxcat ES for the demercaptanization of LPG. (5) Traditionally, this thiol oxidation reaction had utilized cobalt phthalocyanines. Finally, Wijnans, Reynolds, and co-workers from Shell and Quantum Technologies Corporation worked in an international collaboration spanning The Netherlands, Canada, and the United States to develop further understanding of the conversion kinetics of ortho-to-para hydrogen, an important parameter for the liquefaction and storage of hydrogen produced from sustainable systems as part of the energy transition. (6) In the Materials and Interfaces topic area, Denchy and co-workers at the U.S. small business Advanced Cooling Technologies describe an innovative nonthermal hydrogen plasma process and the scaleup to 100 g/batch, allowing the reuse of metal additive manufacturing feedstock powder. (7) Lastly, in the topic area of Process Systems Engineering, Haque and co-workers at Aramco describe the scaleup of the production of nanocomposite resin coated sand particles from laboratory to industrial scale for use as a crush resistant material in hydraulic fracturing. (8) They started at 150 g scale and scaled to the 50 000 kg level, investigating concepts like the impact of coating cycle times on performance and economics as they conducted field trials. Turunawarasu and colleagues from Pace CCS, Ltd. and global collaborators from Malaysia, Australia, and Hungary describe solutions to heat exchanger networks used in turbo-expander based cryogenic CO₂ capture systems. They utilized a graph theory based heat integration tool to study many CO₂ capture systems, noting the CryoDT process to be the least costly over time due to OPEX savings. (9) In addition to the Special Issue, I&ECR published additional work from industrial authors in 2024. I would like to highlight several of these papers as well. Deng and co-workers from PetroChina describe synthetic mechanisms and characterization of titanium-substituted Beta zeolite for epoxidation. (10) This catalyst is aimed at the production of 1,2-hexanediol via the hydrolysis of epoxidized 1-hexene. A hydrophobically modified chitosan was shown by D’Avino and colleagues at Procter & Gamble (P&G) to perform as an interesting biorenewable platform for fabric care additives. (11) This Newcastle, U.K.-based work synthesized and characterized polymers and performed anti-redeposition tests. Powell and co-workers at the Texas-based small business framergy collaborated with researchers at Texas A&M to study the extrusion of MOFs into MOF/polymer technical bodies. (12) They utilized classical twin-screw extruders for melt extrusion of polyolefins to produce the bodies. Wu and co-workers at Northeastern University in China collaborated with colleagues at Fujian Longking to utilize computational fluid dynamics (CFD) to investigate complex pipe networks. (13) Pipe networks in many laboratory and industrial complexes are quite intricate with bends, restrictions, and expansions. The study helps to facilitate the accurate design and stable operation of pipe network systems. Wang and coauthors at Ningxia Coal and Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China studied the accurate prediction of the mass-transfer characteristics of bubble columns, again using CFD approaches. (14) Among the key conclusions is that, due to the bubble swarm effect, the drag force model for isolated bubbles should be adjusted by considering the gas volume fraction and wall lubrication. Chen and colleagues at Sinopec and East China Normal University studied the impact of reactive distillation packing on the performance of 1-butene isomerization to 2-butene. (15) The structure of the packing utilized impacts the static liquid holdup and operational flexibility of the units. Meanwhile, Gonzalez and co-workers at the Universidad de Sevilla in Spain utilized Abengoa funding to study the separation process to produce biobutanol from ethanol via the Guerbet reaction. (16) Among other results, in moving from design to pilot-scale separations in 4-m-tall columns, a separate butanol column was required downstream of the hexanol column to achieve high product purities. This process is now under commercialization by Catalyxx. Also in separations, Brockkötter and co-workers at Bayer collaborated with Aachen University in Germany to further develop the modeling of liquid–liquid extraction (LLE) in real systems. (17) Typically models are parametrized and validated using standard test systems (STSs) of highest purity; however, in most industrial use cases, the technical systems are characterized by an incomplete list of components, impurities, and batch-dependent physicochemical properties. Industrial research even takes the form of this University of Kansas work, where industry provided the refrigerant and the labor to convert an air handling unit from standard HFC-134a refrigerant over to a new, low global warming potential (GWP) refrigerant R-513a for a direct comparative study between the two refrigerants, in the field, under real use conditions. (18) Finally, I’d like to highlight the thinking that we industrial researchers carry out as we approach sustainability transitions to determine best future processes. Chintapalli and co-workers at Seattle-based Orca Sciences discuss their thoughts on the decarbonization of the chemical industry. (19) Their analysis suggests distinct roles for thermochemistry and bioproduction in a decarbonized world and suggest the types of molecules best-suited to bioproduction or thermochemical synthesis. In conclusion, industrial researchers from across the globe continue to advance the translation of fundamental science from lab to commercialization and publish those results in I&ECR. Nineteen such works are showcased here in the 2024 Industrial Research: From Lab to Commercialization Special Issue. This article references 19 other publications. This article has not yet been cited by other publications.