NEWS OF THE W EEK
SOLUTIA CONSIDERS SPLITTING IN HALF BUSINESS: Number two nylon
maker may sell its business to focus on specialties
S
SOLU TIA
Solutia wants to stick with specialty films and explore other options for its nylon business.
OLUTIA HAS ENLISTED the investment bank
HSBC Securities to help it explore alternatives for its nylon business, including a possible sale. In 2007, the business had revenues of $1.89 billion, or about 51% of Solutia’s total sales. An exit would leave the company, which emerged from bankruptcy just four months ago, with what it considers faster growing businesses in specialty chemicals and performance materials. Solutia has shifted its nylon business away from stagnant fiber markets and toward faster growing engineering resins. “We have transformed our nylon business from a North American-focused fiber business into the world’s second-largest producer of nylon 6,6 plastics,” CEO Jeffry N. Quinn says. The company claims to be one of only two nylon producers in the world that has a complete range of technology to produce nylon
SORTING NANOTUBES NANOTECHNOLOGY: Chemical coating winnows tiny carbon tubes by chirality
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Y FUNCTIONALIZING the surface of silicon, scientists at Stanford University and Samsung have devised a way to sort single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWNTs) according to their chirality (Science 2008, 321, 101). The method could help solve a long-standing problem in the fabrication of nanotubebased electronics. Depending upon the spatial arrangement of its carbon atoms—its chirality—a SWNT can behave as either a metal or a semiconductor. Both types of tube are promising as electronic components, but they don’t work well together. Unfortunately, SWNTs are produced as a mix of both chiralities. Although a number of methods can separate metallic and semiconducting SWNTs, none so far has proven practical for STAN FO RD UN IVERSIT Y
Bao (from left) with her research team of Melburne C. LeMieux, Mark Roberts, and Soumendra Barman.
WWW.C E N- ONLI NE .ORG
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6,6. The other company with this capability is Invista. But given the strength of Solutia’s other businesses and the challenging dynamics of the nylon industry, Quinn believes it’s time to explore other options. First-quarter nylon sales were up 10% compared with the first quarter of 2007, but higher raw material costs resulted in a $7 million pretax loss for the business. At the same time, combined pretax income for Solutia’s Saflex, CPFilms, and technical specialties businesses was up 23% to $108 million in the first quarter. Solutia wouldn’t be the first to exit nylon fibers. In 2004, DuPont sold its nylon and spandex businesses for $4.2 billion to Koch Industries, which combined them with its own polyester operations to form Invista. During 2007, 28% of Solutia’s nylon sales were in Asia, and the company says it can efficiently serve global markets from its North American facilities. But Karen M. Jones, director for fibers and feedstocks in the Americas at Houston-based Chemical Market Associates, suggests market conditions may be challenging. “We expect additional capacity will come on in Asia and depending on how quickly that happens, Solutia’s ability to continue to run its assets is going to be threatened,” she says. Private equity firms that believe they can run the business more profitably are potential buyers, Jones says, as are other nylon producers wanting to create a global position.—ANN THAYER
large-scale applications, according to Stanford chemical engineering professor Zhenan Bao. In theory, metallic and semiconducting SWNTs should interact differently with certain functional groups. Bao and her research team reasoned they could simultaneously sort nanotubes by chirality and make thin-film transistors by adding functional group coatings to the surface of silicon substrates and then applying the SWNTs via spin coating. They found that semiconducting nanotubes preferentially cling to substrates with a coating of primary amines, while metallic SWNTs hold fast to substrates functionalized with phenyl groups. The spin coating process flings away the nonsticking type of nanotube. From a typical SWNT blend, Bao’s team was able to make transistors enriched with 90–95% of the nanotubes of desired chirality. “The method we’ve developed could be very useful for developing low-cost transparent electrodes for large-area displays and solar panels or as a means of sorting nanotubes for other applications,” Bao says. “This is a great contribution,” comments Fotios Papadimitrakopoulos, a chemistry professor at the University of Connecticut who studies SWNTs. He notes that Bao’s technique “provides an interesting venue for the directed assembly of carbon nanotubes for network thin-film transistors,” but adds that a considerable amount of work still is required to realize the full potential of single-walled carbon nanotubes for electronic applications.—BETHANY HALFORD
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