Insulation industry news from Global Insulation
IndiNature hopes to open new bio-insulation plant in Scotland 18 October 2019
UK: Edinburgh-based bio-insulation company IndiNature is preparing to build a Euro4.4m production plant at Hawick in southern Scotland. The company is currently in talks with Scottish Borders Council, contractors and others about the project, according to the Southern Reporter newspaper. The 2600m3 plant is set to create 30 jobs. It is hoped that the new unit will be ready by the end of 2020. IndiNature manufactures its rigid IndiBoard and IndiTherm batts insulation products from plant-based materials.
Researchers turn CO2 into polyurethane precursor 18 October 2019
China/Japan: Researchers from Kyoto University, the University of Tokyo in Japan and Jiangsu Normal University in China have developed a new material that can selectively capture carbon dioxide (CO2) molecules and convert them into ‘useful’ organic materials, including a precursor for polyurethane. The research project has been described in the journal Nature Communications.
The material is a porous coordination polymer (PCP, also known as a metal-organic framework), a framework consisting of zinc metal ions. The researchers tested their material using X-ray structural analysis and found that it can selectively capture only CO2 molecules with ten times more efficiency than other PCPs. The material has an organic component with a propeller-like molecular structure, and as CO2 molecules approach the structure, they rotate and rearrange to permit CO2 trapping, resulting in slight changes to the molecular channels within the PCP. This allows it to act as molecular sieve that can recognise molecules by size and shape. The PCP is also recyclable; the efficiency of the catalyst did not decrease even after 10 reaction cycles.
After capturing the carbon, the converted material can be used to make polyurethane, a material with a wide variety of applications including insulation materials.