The Editor Looks a t .
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I/EC OCTOBER 1957
Everybody’s Still Talking about Boron.
I/EC is no exception. Most of what we’ve said this year has been about military applications. Now we’re turning civilian. Metal Hydrides is quite proud of its potassium borohydride operation at Beverly, Mass., the only commercial production of this compound in the country. Five years ago Metal Hydrides sold 22 pounds of KBH4. This year sales are expected to be 22,000 pounds. Primarily used to date as a reducing compound in the pharmaceutical industry, KBHd has so many other possibilities that Metal Hydrides thinks a 1960 output of 100,000 pounds is possible.
New Equipment and Ideas for collecting data on a small scale to obtain valid information for larger scale operation are always more than welcome (in fact, the Division of Industrial and Engineering Chemistry held a symposium on this subject at the New York ACS meeting just completed). Two articles in the October issue take this approach, one with distillation, one with solvent extraction. Continuous, automatic, distillation units which closely simulate full scale commercial performance can be assembled on a single laboratory bench. For developing a fractional liquid extraction pattern with a single solvent and reflux, Scheibel presents a n original approach, with equipment and operating techniques. Here IS a-Polymer with Excellent Resistance to heat, chemicals, and the swelling action of lubes, fuels, and hydraulic fluids. Identity: the copolymer of vinylidene and hexafluoropropylene. Particular possibilities : aircraft. Researchists: Du Pont’s Dixon, Rexford, Rugg. The Metal Terephthalamates work better than conventional soaps as gelling agents for lube oils and other liquids.
Details of this Cal Research work are found on page 1691.
New Corrosion Inhibitors for Diesel crankcase lubricants is an area whose development may be stimulated by another Cal Research article (page 1703). Few service problems have arisen with copper-lead bearings used for years in Diesel engines because good corrosion inhibitors have been developed. Now that use of silver bearings in heavy duty engines is becoming widespread, a real problem arises. Currently used inhibitors contain sulfur. You know what sulfur does to silver. Decontaminate Radioactively Contaminated Water, SO that it can be used for emergency drinking water within 15 minutes? Fort Belvoir and Oak Ridge studies show how this is possible under certain conditions with ion exchange resins. Processing Low-Grade Ores with Bacteria is not a new subject with us. Bryner and coworkers a t Brigham Young University continue their work on microbiological oxidation of sulfide minerals (for copper recovery see p. 2587 in I/EC’s 1954 volume) with work on molybdenum. Certain bacteria found in leaching streams for waste rock dumps in Utah can oxidize molybdenite, first step in molybdenum recovery from low-grade ores. Safety-Safety-Safety begins in predrawing board planning, continues ad infinitum through all plant operation, and management and employee thinking. When it doesn’t, it should. Equipment, standards, information from a variety of angles constitute the symposium on Safety in the Chemical Industry. As important extras, the editors have also included in this issue studies on the stability of cyanogen and of concentrated solutions of HzOz.
VOL. 49, NO. 10
OCTOBER 1957
1663
