Volume 1 Issue 2, February 2024

Polyimide-derived carbon molecular sieve (CMS) membranes mark an important step for various current, key energy-intensive separations. The excellent separation performance combined with economical scalability make CMS membranes ready to enable energy-transition-focused gas separations.

Kai Qiao, a senior engineer at SINOPEC Dalian Research Institute of Petroleum and Petrochemicals Co., Ltd, and a visiting professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at Dalian University of Technology, talks to Nature Chemical Engineering about his career as a chemical engineer working on biomass-derived chemical production.

We asked a group of chemical engineering educators with a broad set of research interests to reimagine the undergraduate curriculum, highlighting both current strengths and areas of needed development.

Directing CO₂ electroreduction toward a single C₂ product poses challenges because the reaction mechanism is unclear. Now, oxygen affinity is identified as a potential key descriptor to manipulate the selectivity of ethylene versus ethanol.

Designing liquid devices with liquid pathways that can be reconfigured on-demand is important to many chemical and biological applications. Now, a facile approach enables reconfigurable liquid devices through precisely arranged connected liquid droplets that can be rapidly assembled and disassembled.

Tandem catalysis and tandem reactors provide unique opportunities for sustainably converting CO₂ into valuable products that are not accessible by traditional catalytic processes. This Perspective discusses progress in and opportunities for developing tandem catalytic process that involve various combinations of thermocatalysis, electrocatalysis, photocatalysis, plasma catalysis and biocatalysis.

Building liquid devices from solid enclosing walls can be costly and lack reconfigurability. Now the rapid construction and reconfiguration of diverse liquid devices is demonstrated through assembly and disassembly of droplet arrays in a pillared substrate.

Steering the selectivity-determining steps is as important as the C–C coupling steps in CO₂ electroreduction. Here the authors highlight that single-site noble metal dopants on the Cu surface can influence C–O bond dissociation and direct the post-C–C coupling pathways to ethylene versus ethanol.

Selective recovery of gold from electronic waste using mild reagents is a challenge. Now a photocatalytic technology is reported to enable highly selective gold dissolution through solvent pH adjustment. This process is scaled up to allow for the efficient handling of a single batch of 10 kg of electronic waste.

The automated synthesis of highly reactive compounds is challenging. Now a digital automated platform is developed for safer, inert-atmosphere synthesis of air-, moisture-, pressure- and temperature-sensitive compounds from across the periodic table.

Omar Matar explains how changes in surface tension can cause fluid flow, while navigating a sea of related dimensionless numbers.