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The BIO International Convention will be held from June 3 to 6 at the Pennsylvania Convention Centre in Philadelphia. It is expected to attract 16,000 participants. On June 4 at 11:00 AM in Room 110AB, Drystill is hosting an educational Session entitled “Is Hand-Me-Down Separation Technology Holding Back The Bioeconomy?” It was Drystill that proposed the topic to BIO. BIO accepted the proposal and Drystill organized the session. A panel of five distinguished speakers will…

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Life on earth is threatened by greenhouse gas accumulation in the atmosphere. Climate scientists have been sounding this alarm for many years. In 2015, representatives of  196 countries met in Paris and pledged to take abatement measures. But the targets set are not close to being met.  Environmental groups are urging people to become activists to save the planet. Generally, what is meant by that term is a person who strives to achieve a certain…

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Process modelling tools such as Aspen Plus are indispensable in developing new unit operations like PTD and predicting how they will perform in the context of a chemical plant. In 2016 Hayley Hayden Smestad wrote her Chemical Engineering Master’s thesis at Worcester Polytechnic Institute on the topic of applying PTD to ethanol/water separation. She concluded “Aspen Plus V8.8 was used for the determination of parameters to use with the eNRTL­RK property method to accurately model…

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In 2014 two Canadian Companies collaborated to test Pass-through distillation experimentally. One of the companies,Fielding Chemical Technologies Inc., is Canada’s foremost chemical recycler. Fielding wanted to learn through the pilot plant whether or not PTD could offer advanced treatment of hazardous industrial waste. The other company, Drystill Holdings Inc., is a start-up technology company that has invented and patented equipment specifically for PTD, including the Stripper/Absorber Module (SAM) described in the fifth and sixth lectures…

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There are only so many unit operations known to chemical engineers, so it seems safe to say that every conceivable pair of them has been considered and, where appropriate, tested out in lab or plant. Some pairs exhibit such useful synergies that the combination becomes a unit operation in its own right, and it acquires a name of its own; witness evaporation + condensation = distillation. I have searched the literature for references to current…

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  Keynote Address for PEO Gala Good evening Ladies and Gentlemen. It is a great honour to address you tonight on behalf of Drystill, this year’s project of the year winner in the small company category. I would like to tell you our story. It is a story of how a very small Canadian company is making a big impact on world-scale problems. Removal of ethanol from watery mixtures, like fermentation broth, is an important…

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This year Akzo Nobel launched the first global innovation challenge for startups in chemistry. Through a competition called “Imagine Chemistry” Akzo is trying to accelerate the commercialization of important new ideas from around the world. On April 5, 2017 Program Manager Rinske van Heiningen announced that Drystill has been selected as one of ten finalists. She wrote:“We received over 200 submissions for more sustainable chemistry, which we have carefully reviewed with our team of researchers.…

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BRAMPTON, ONTARIO Sheridan College and Drystill Technologies are collaborating on a project to test pass-through distillation at lab scale, assisted by funding from NSERC. The project formally commenced on May 30, 2016 and will operate until the end of the year. Many important industrial separations will be tested using room temperature pass-through distillation, including: separation of ethanol from fermentation broth separation of essential oils from aqueous slurry removal of water from corn ethanol plant syrup…

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Pass-through Distillation (PTD) is a powerful public domain concept, but to date its only commercial champion is the Canadian company Drystill.  Drystill’s contribution to the field is a proprietary piece of equipment called a SAM, which combines the first two process steps into a compact and efficient unit. When PTD is carried out using a SAM, the process is given a Drystill tradename,  TIEGA. This video is something of a Drystill infomercial,

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