SinodosChemistry

Sustainable growth is the key for future development and survival of our organizations, communities and human kind itself. Although this has been understood in depth my most engineering and developmental pioneers during the last two decades, implementation of basic principles and plans is somewhat delayed, especially in the developing countries. Sustainable development envisions a future that is not built on the next generations’ shoulders; on the contrary, future growth should rely on today’s managerial planning and efforts based on our understanding of future needs and scientific and technological advances.

Inorganics do not include carbon and their main products include:

Novel nanomaterials are discovered every day and our enhanced abilities for manufacturing and prediction of properties are expected to support this growth for the years to come. Numerous nanomaterial categories can be identified that are of great interest for investors and manufactures, with some of the most important being:

Petrochemical is a vast category of chemicals derived from oil and gas. They can be described by categorization of the most important of them into base chemicals, intermediates, formulated products and end – uses. Most important base products include:

Hydrogen energy has seen some very significant improvements during the last years, mainly due to new ideas based on older findings, such as novel storage materials with combined physical structures of different precursors. The main obstacle in hydrogen use as an efficient energy carrier has been its low volumetric energetic capacity in contrast to its high mass energetic capacity. For this reason, although its use presents unique advantages, its use has been stalled during the last years.

Up to date hydrogen could be stored and transported via one of the following approaches:

Coal contributes to around 25% electricity generation in EU and to industrial energy generation for specific applications. Most of European countries exhibit availability of coal deposits which are cheap to use. Up to date, most countries use a combination of various energy sources for electricity generation, with coal being the major contribution for most of them. On the other hand, due to the low carbon dioxide emissions regulations, coal use is reduced on a yearly basis across EU. Countries that cannot meet the set goals on coal contribution limits on their electricity generation balance are fined, as in the case of Greece.

Wind energy market has astonished investors by exhibiting huge increases in the last years. US almost doubled their installed power and the increases are expected to continue since required legislation for stability issues has finally been passed. This stability period is a great opportunity for US organizations to aggressively move towards clean energy and emissions free energy faster than other regions of the world. China’s performance has been unpredicted due to the financial slowing down that markets were aware of. However China installed 23GW in 2014 and 30GW in 2015, showing their commitment to emission free energy generation. Financial slowdown is continuing in 2016, but a continuous though smaller increase should be anticipated for China for the next few years.

Solar science has been experiencing continuous improvements in panels manufacturing for the last 15 years. The newest approach is the use of quantum dots in combination with the popular titanium dioxide and zinc oxide cores. Older approach utilized dyes instead of Quantum Dots and some organic perovskite based dyes have been reported to achieve 15% efficiency in laboratory scale. The main advantage of quantum dots occurs is their multi electron excitement, which can lead to great increases of efficiencies compared to single electron excitement of most organic dyes. The use of silica based panels seems to irreversibly be abandoned mainly due to higher costs of manufacture in comparison to nano structured metal oxides.

Oil is expected to go through a long period of low demand that will keep prices plunged. Different factors contribute to this conclusion, most important of them being:

-          Shale gas technology finding its way to other regions besides US [like Poland in Europe]. Further adaptation of the technology will drive economies towards shale gas and will provoke its universal use. Oil demand might have come to an end, at least for applications where it can be easily replaced by shale gas.

Wound treatment is a significant research field for the pharmaceutical industry. Biocompatible, non toxic, porous materials with high adhesion to skin cells are required in order to create the optimum wound dressing. Skin itself exhibits self healing ability. Wound dressings act in a two way fashion; they stop loss of important liquids from the body to the environment and they inhibit pathogens entry to the body via the wound. Optimum wound dressings are highly porous and based on bio compatible polymers such as chitosan. Fibrous nanomaterial coatings offer additional advantages such as more connection points to the skin surface, minimum permeability of pathogens, and an ordered microporous three dimensional modifiable network with tailored physical, chemical and biological properties. Hydrophilicity of the manufactured membrane coatings is a requirement that is easily met either by choosing a known hydrophilic polymeric matrix or by the tailoring of the coating surface’s structure.