Liquid fuel from polyethylene. Free Technical Library News

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Polyethylene liquid fuel

04.02.2022

Polyethylene is the most common plastic in the world. More than 100 tons are produced every year. The problem is that it is an incredibly inert material that does not react with almost anything, and therefore does not decompose under natural conditions.

Zheng Huan, a chemist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, was able to decompose polyethylene at 150 degrees Celsius by adding an organometallic catalyst, a small, commercially available organic molecule containing iridium. The catalyst weakens the bonds responsible for the strong structure of polyethylene, accelerating its decomposition and turning it into a liquid product.

"The resulting products are much cleaner than conventional incineration products," Huang says, adding that the reaction is easier to control and the liquid can be used as a fuel.

So far, the process has been demonstrated on small samples of plastic bags, bottles, and food packaging.

Now scientists are facing two problems: firstly, to increase production and try to bring a new method to an industrial level, and, secondly, to replace iridium - a rare and precious platinum metal - with something cheaper, although there may be a problem, since metal Catalysts, due to their specificity, cannot simply be replaced. But Chinese chemists remain optimistic and assure that they will soon be able to produce new material in liters and even tons.

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Found the coldest place in the solar system 11.06.2022

The coldest place on Earth is the eastern part of Queen Maud Land in Antarctica. Here, in some remote areas, temperatures can drop to minus 92°C. However, there are places outside of our planet that make Dronning Maud Land seem like an incredibly warm place.

Uranus is the coldest of the eight planets, with an average temperature slightly lower than that of Neptune, although it is closer to the Sun than Neptune (The solar system does not always follow logic). The average temperature on Uranus is minus 195°C, while on Earth it is 14°C.

However, outer space is a rather spacious place, so it is quite logical to assume that Uranus is not the coldest object in the solar system.

Indeed, the piercingly cold ice giant is one of the least hospitable places in the solar system. Such temperatures, combined with the fact that Uranus has an atmosphere made up of helium, hydrogen and methane, means that nothing can survive there. However, there may be regions on our Moon with even colder temperatures.

In a recent study, scientists S. Byrne and P. O'Brien from the University of Arizona found that "permanently shaded regions" (PSR) on the Moon are among the coldest places in the solar system. Moreover, these areas have been sheltered from the heat of the sun for billions of years.

Permanently shaded regions are areas near the north and south poles of the moon that never receive direct sunlight and are therefore very cold. They are heated only by reflected heat, but even this heat cannot reach some regions.

Depressions within permanently shaded regions are protected not only from direct sunlight, but also from secondary heat sources. And this means that such depressions may be the coldest regions in the solar system. As the study showed, in these places the temperature can reach minus 248°C or even lower.

The only region that surpasses this extreme cold is the mysterious Oort Cloud, a vast, distant region that NASA describes as a spherical region made up of icy mountain-sized chunks of space debris. According to scientists, the surface temperature here is about minus 268°C.

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