Slashdot Mirror
Scientists Attempt to Replace Crude Oil With Sugars
amigoro writes with a link to the Press Esc blog, discussing a possible replacement for crude oil in plastics, fuels, and other industrial uses. The post outlines findings to be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Science. Essentially, researchers at the Institute for Interfacial Catalysis are attempting to process the sugars in plant matter into an oil-like compound, a daunting challenge. "Glucose, in plant starch and cellulose, is nature's most abundant sugar. 'But getting a commercially viable yield of HMF from glucose has been very challenging,' Zhang said. 'In addition to low yield until now, we always generate many different byproducts,' including levulinic acid, making product purification expensive and uncompetitive with petroleum-based chemicals. Zhang, lead author and former post doc Haibo Zhao, and colleagues John Holladay and Heather Brown, all from PNNL, were able to coax HMF yields upward of 70 percent from glucose and nearly 90 percent from fructose while leaving only traces of acid impurities."
hemp.
what were we talking about again?
...I'm going to try it out by putting some sugar in my gas tank. If it works well I'll increase the amount. With a little luck I'll be able to save lots of money on gas. :-)
I once worked at a place where my boss rediscovered the formula for dynamite. They were trying to do a selenium assay on vitamin pills. RDA for selenium is micrograms per day and for the atomic absorption test you have to dissolve the sample in acid so the spectrometer can spray it into a flame and check absorption/emission wavelengths of elements in the sample. But if you dissolve a vitamin pill in acid the selenium becomes too dilute to measure.
He was basically trying to liquify a multivitamin, which has all kinds of crap in it. Generally you use a mixture of concentrated sulfuric and nitric acids to liquify something. The pills wouldn't dissolve when he tried digestion on an open burner, because the temperature at 1 atmosphere won't get high enough. They make steel digestion bombs for this kind of situation. They're like soup cans with stainless steel armor one inch thick around a ceramic liner inside. If the temperature exceeds 50 atmospheres a little safety valve on top pops to relieve the pressure. So he decided to buy 5 of these things, to let the pressure and temperature rise without losing any contents of the five sample tablets as he dissolved them under concentrated acids.
This turned out to be a cardinal error. The tablets had a binder made of sodium benzoate. If you heat benzoate at high temperature and pressure under concentrated sulfuric and nitric acid, it turns into trinitrobenzoate which dissolves in water all right but is also a class A explosive. So they put the five vitamin tablets in the acids, sealed the bombs, and put them in the oven at 105 C which they actually had set up in a conference room where people would write up experiments. I was across the hall with a clear line of sight to the oven when the first bomb exploded inside. It sounded like someone took 5000 dinner plates and smashed them on the floor all at once, and the oven turned into a pile of kitty litter and silicate and asbestos and the conference room filled up with brown nitrogen dioxide. Then two more exploded and fired off in different directions. One penetrated the HR office next door (they moved upstairs the next week) and one buried itself in the wall of the conference room while people were still running outside. (The other two were duds.)
I almost got killed by a multivitamin that day. You know, you live your life, day in and day out, and you don't realize how fragile life is until one day you almost get killed by an exploding vitamin tablet. In an interstellar burst I am back to save the universe.
Not being a native English speaker, of course my boss gets on the phone with 911 and tells them that his bombs exploded.