Recycling polyolefin materials is challenging. One waste management strategy is plastic upcycling. New work demonstrates a single-step upcycling route coupling cracking and alkylation, recycling carbon and keeping valuable resources active.
A PNNL innovation uses steam to recover heat from the high-temperature reactor effluent in the HTL process, substantially reducing the propensity for fouling and potentially reducing costs.
The work by the team at PNNL takes a critical step in leveraging ML to accelerate advanced manufacturing R&D, specifically for manufacturing techniques without access to efficient, first-principles simulations.