Month: November 2021

According to a news release, Sinopec’s subsidiary Tianjin Petrochemical Industry has successfully tested a pilot plant for direct steam cracking of crude oil into ethylene, propylene and other chemicals. It is estimated that for every 1 million tons of crude oil processed by this technology, nearly 500,000 tons of chemicals can be produced, including nearly 400,000 tons of high-value products such as ethylene, propylene, light aromatics, and hydrogen. In April 2021, Sinopec’s Yangzhou plant had reported on a new crude oil catalytic cracking technology with similar yields.  A combination of both procedures might lead to yields around 70%. As a next step, Sinopec will design a complete set of technologies for the production of ethylene by steam cracking of one million tons of crude oil at its Tahe Refinery in Xinjiang. In the end, Sinopec expects to shorten the production process, reduce production costs, and significantly reduce energy consumption and carbon emissions. The Eight Element Plastic Edition Report, November 11, 2021

Yan-Ping Shi, Jun-Li Yang and colleagues at the Lanzhou Institute for Chemical Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences have developed a sensitive detection for α-glucosidase activity in natural product extracts or blood serum. They used 4-hydroxyphenyl-α-D-glucopyranosyl, which reacts to hydroquinone after cleavage by α-glucosidase, to form orange-red or yellow fluorescent silicon-containing nanoparticles (Si CNPs) in aqueous solution with the silylating reagent 3(2-aminoethylamino)propyl-dimethoxymethylsilane.  Using fluorescence or absorbance measurement, they were able to quantitatively detect α-glucosidase inhibitors or α-glucosidase activity in serum with high sensitivity using this method. https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.analchem.1c03210

According to a development plan on digital infrastructure by the MIIT, China’s 5G network will cover all cities and towns, as well as most villages by 2025, with 26 5G base stations per 10000 people. Gigabit optical fiber network will cover most urban and rural areas, and facilities and services for data and computing will be enhanced remarkably. The plan elucidates that information communication technology and economic and social fields will be deeply integrated, new forms of businesses based on the internet will boom and the scope of industrial internet innovation and application will further extend to the core links of manufacturing. A new type of supervision system will protect users’ rights and interests, especially their personal information. Xinhua news release, November 17, 2021

The 825 km line surrounds the Taklimakan Desert, China’s largest desert, in Northwest China’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. Linking the city of Hotan with Ruoqiang county in the Bayingolin Mongol Autonomous Prefecture, it will play a vital role in enhancing connectivity and promoting development. People’s Daily November 16, 2021

According to an article in China Science News, China’s sales of cell phones using graphene thermal conductive film such as Huawei Mate 20X were close to 29 million, and the cumulative amount of graphene film were about 1.3 million square meters in the past 12 months. With the rapid increase of 5G smartphone penetration, graphene thermal conductive film is expected to see explosive growth. In order to cope with the heat dissipation demand of high-power electronic devices, CAS Shanxi Institute of Coal Chemistry formed a “709 + 705” team, and successfully developed a graphene thermal conductivity sheet with high heat flux, good flexibility and other comprehensive indicators. It has built a ten-ton graphene oxide slurry and a thousand-square-meter graphene membrane pilot platform, which has been used in many satellites and has become a qualified supplier for China Aerospace Science and Technology Group and China Electric Power Group. Graphene thermal conductive film has both high thermal conductivity (1000~1200 W/mK) and high thickness (100~300μm). In addition, its lateral heat expansion capacity is more than four times that of artificial graphite film prepared from polyimide film. It needs to be graphitized at a high temperature above 2800°C, but currently only a discontinuous production process can be used, which has high energy consumption and low production efficiency. The team has established a pilot plant for an annual production capacity of ten tons of graphene oxide, which can eventually produce 1,000 square meters of graphene film, which can be used for 22,000 cell phones, and can meet the needs of about 100 satellites. As a next step, the team will propose to build a production line with an annual capacity of 200,000 square meters of high-throughput graphene film according to market demand. China Science News 2021-11-15 Page 3 Energy and Chemical Industry

According to the Institute of Industrial Internet and Internet of Things under the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT), by 2023 major cities across the country will have been basically covered by the IoT modernizing social governance, industrial digitalization, and consumption upgrading. According to statistics, By the end of 2020, the ownership of IoT SIM cards in China had exceeded 1.2 billion, and the country’s number of backbone IoT enterprises with an output value of more than one billion yuan surpassed 200. The scale of the country’s IoT industry exceeded 2.4 trillion yuan ($375.8 billion), surpassing the target of 1.5 trillion yuan set out in the country’s 13th Five-Year Plan (2016-2020). According to the MIIT, the new plan encourages aunits that have mastered key and core technologies in such fields as intellisense, new-type short-distance communication, and high-accuracy positioning and pool efforts to launch a batch of IoT terminals, platforms, and services featuring advanced technologies, extraordinary performance, and good user experience. People’s Daily, November 13, 2021

It has six research teams consisting of experts from various organizations such as the Chinese Academy of Forestry, Seoul National University and the University of Tokyo. They will carry out research on plants, animals, microorganisms and ecosystem diversity. The research center will establish a comprehensive monitoring and evaluation system, and conduct in-depth study on the current state, trend and maintenance mechanism of biodiversity in Northeast Asia in the face of climate change and economic globalization. Xinhua news release, November 13, 2021

According to Xinhua, the total floor area of China’s green buildings has exceeded 6.6 billion square meters amid the country’s efforts to promote high-quality development in urban and rural areas. Following a 2017 guideline proposing demonstration projects of ultra-low-energy-consuming and near-zero-energy-consuming buildings, Gaobeidian, about 100 km south of Beijing, boasts a passive building construction area of 1.2 million square meters, the world’s largest passive complex. Local residents said the temperature in their apartments remains at 20 degrees Celsius without heating in winter or air conditioning in summer. Xinhua news release, November 12, 2021 (details, also about construction, shown in a movie) http://en.people.cn/n3/2021/1112/c90000-9918802.html 

A team around Guangtao ZAN from Tongji University, Inspired by the silkworm cocooning processes, has designed a super-foldable conductive carbon material with layered nanofiber network structures.The material can bear one million folds without structural damage and conductivity fluctuations. It features appropriate pores, non-crosslinked junctions, slidable nanofibers, separable layers, and a compressible network which act synergistically to generate a folding construction at the crease. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.matt.2021.07.021