SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the good-thing-it's-all-around-us dept.
A nifty move with nitrogen has brought the world one step closer to creating a range of useful products—from dyes to pharmaceuticals—out of thin air.
The discovery comes from a team of Yale chemists who found a way to combine atmospheric nitrogen with benzene to make a chemical compound called aniline, which is a precursor to materials used to make an assortment of synthetic products.
[...] Holland said previous attempts by other researchers to combine atmospheric nitrogen and benzene failed. Those attempts used highly reactive derivatives of benzene that would degrade before they could produce a chemical reaction with nitrogen.
Holland and his colleagues used an iron compound to break down one of the chemical bonds in benzene. They also treated the nitrogen with a silicon compound that allowed the nitrogen to combine with benzene.
Journal Reference:
Sean F. McWilliams et al. Coupling dinitrogen and hydrocarbons through aryl migration, Nature (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-2565-5
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Thursday August 13 2020, @04:51PM (1 child)
It's not hard to separate Nitrogen from atmosphere.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday August 14 2020, @03:55AM
Understood. It doesn't add hugely to the cost. But it does add. And, of course, how much it adds depends on the required purity. Medical oxygen machines run on household current, so it can't be very expensive. I'm assuming that it generates the oxygen via fractionating. OTOH, you neither usually need or want pure oxygen in medical uses. But presumably those machines separate oxygen from nitrogen to a fair degree of purity. That they're designed to recover the oxygen rather than the nitrogen should be a trivial design difference.
But if you need to add that extra step, then it's less useful. And if it needs to be highly purified, then the costs are higher.
But my main complaint was WRT the presentation. The summary made it sound as if you could just pipe in air.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.