INVESTMENT
More from Abroad The $56 billion chemical market in this country continues to lure foreign firms. Latest developments in foreign chemical company activity in the U.S. are: • N O V O Industri A / S , Copenhagen-based biochemical company, last week founded NOVO Enzyme Corp. here. The company, which will be located on a 42-acre site at Crotonon-Hudson, N.Y., will produce Alcalase protease enzyme for laundry presoaks and heavy-duty detergents, and "second generation" enzymes. • West Germany's Badische Anilin-& Soda-Fabrik, A.G., has acquired more than 67% of Wyandotte Chemicals common stock. • France's Société Française d'Organo-Synthese has formed a joint venture with Neville Chemical Co., Pittsburgh. The new firm will be called Neville-Synthese Organics, Inc., and will produce UV light absorbers, antioxidants, and polymerization initiation catalysts. • British Petroleum and Sohio say they will go forward with their merger despite what the Justice Department says may be serious problems. • On the other hand, Justice has given the green light for the Dutch firm Koninklijke Zout-Organon, N.V. (KZO), to acquire International Salt. • Rhodia, Inc., U.S. subsidiary of France's Rhone-Poulenc, plans to build an isoprene derivatives plant on a 50-acre site at Brazosport, purchased from Dow Chemical. Earlier, ICI announced plans to build a $50 million polyester film plant at Hopewell, Va., and BASF Corp. (U.S. subsidiary of Badische Anilin-& Soda-Fabrik) said it plans a $100 million complex at Port Victoria, S.C. (C&EN, Oct. 6, page 12). The most active foreign chemical company in the U.S. recently has been Badische Anilin-& Soda-Fabrik. The book value of its U.S. subsidiary, BASF Corp., is now about $35 million. By 1975, BASF Corp. will have a book value of $250 million from expansions announced so far this year. This figure doesn't include the estimated $65 million the parent company (operating through its holding company BASF Overzee, N.V.) has spent to acquire its two-thirds interest in Wyandotte. BASF's tender offer to pay $33.50 per share for Wyandotte common in an attempt to acquire 100% of the Michigan firm expired last week and was not extended. BASF has not revealed how Wyandotte will be assimilated into its organization. Other investments of BASF, A.G., in the U.S. are 100% ownership of BASF Sys-
tems and 50% interest in Dow-Badische. BASF Systems, Bedford, Mass., produces magnetic tape and had 1968 sales of $4.5 million, while fiber maker Dow-Badische's sales last year were $65 million.
FIBERS
Nylon 4 Ready for Market Fanning the embers of his 20-yearold research project, Radiation Research Corp. president Carl E. Barnes is renewing his efforts to commercialize nylon 4 as a textile fiber. At a press conference in New York City, Dr. Barnes indicated that he has solved the problems of polymer instability associated with melt spinning and that nylon 4 is in the "advanced research stage" ready for production scale-up. Dr. Barnes has patent applications pending covering composition of mat-
Radiation Research's Barnes 20-year-old project
ter and processing for his recent nylon 4 improvements. These improvements result from a new catalyst system that yields more stable nylon 4 polymers than have been produced to date. He also shares a 1953 patent on the original nylon 4 development (U.S. Patent 2,638,463, issued to William O. Ney, Jr., William R. Nummy, and Dr. Carl E. Barnes, and assigned to Arnold, Hoffman & Co., Inc.). Now, Dr. Barnes is offering the nylon 4 package for license on a joint venture or equity position basis. Currently, Radiation Research is making about 5000 pounds a month of nylon 4 resin at its labs in Stamford, Conn., and is shipping resin to Southern Research Institute, Birmingham, Ala., for melt spinning into fiber. The U.S. market potential for ny-
lon 4, estimates Dr. Barnes in his characteristically ebullient fashion, will be as much as 200 million pounds a year in the early 1970's. Nylon 4 would be directly competitive with many of cotton's existing markets since the hydrophilic properties of nylon 4 make the fiber especially suitable for towels and clothing. Yet, nylon 4 has a puzzling history of having never been commercialized either by companies routinely screening the family of nylon polymers or by companies which have known of Dr. Barnes' work. Part of the explanation for this is that texts on chemical thermodynamics, including those written by Dr. Wallace H. Carothers while at Du Pont, teach that pyrrolidone (from which nylon 4 is polymerized) and other five-membered ring compounds do not polymerize. Such compounds, the texts say, have practically no ring strain and are stable to the exclusion of forming linear polymers. This theory prevailed when Dr. Barnes was working on polyvinyl pyrrolidone at General Aniline & Film in the late 1940's. While synthesizing vinyl pyrrolidone, Dr. Barnes noted some reaction anomalies which sparked the beginning of nylon 4. Then, Dr. Barnes resigned in 1950 to join Arnold, Hoffman & Co. (now ICI Organics) as director of research and again was at work on polyvinyl pyrrolidone as a blood plasma substitute. He encountered the same monomer synthesis problems and found that pyrrolidone was indeed polymerizing as a complicating reaction. Following further studies, Dr. Barnes and coworkers patented polypyrrolidone, or nylon 4, and outlined applications for the polymer as a textile fiber. Since then, Dr. Barnes has continued to push the development of nylon 4 intermittently while serving as research director of various companies. Whether Dr. Barnes' research success will become a commercial success in the highly competitive fibers market place remains to be seen.
NUCLEAR FUEL
Multinational Company Eight European countries have set up an international nuclear fuel company to make uranium tetrafluoride. Government organizations and private industries from Belgium, Denmark, Italy, France, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and West Germany have formed Société de Fluoration de l'Uranium ( S F U ) . The new company will operate a plant for converting uranyl nitrate produced by the fuel reprocessing NOV. 3, 1969 C&EN 9
