Green and sustainable conferences!

The 15th Annual Green Chemistry & Engineering Conference will be held in Washington from 21 to 23 June 2011, in partnership with the 5th International Conference on Green and Sustainable Chemistry.

Dead line for abstract submission ended on 6 March, but you can attend the conferences.
The program cover a broad range of topic and different industries.

You can find all the information on the ACS web.

SCF Thesis Awards!

Any student having defended a Ph.D. thesis before 31 December 2010 is invited to apply for thesis Award, granted by the International Society for the Advancement of Supercritical Fluids, by submitting his (her) work to the I.S.A.S.F. jury.

The subject of the thesis must be closely related to the practice and/or theory of supercritical fluids (at least half of the work must be directly applicable to supercritical fluids).
A file in English must be submitted to the Society Secretary (brionne@ensic.inpl-nancy.fr) before end of June 2011. It shall include :

• The thesis title 
• Detailed Abstract summarizing all the information that may help the jury evaluation (two to three pages with the list of the pertinent publications already published or to be published) 
• Laboratory and supervisor names and address 
• Environment description : number of students and supervisors dealing with supercritical fluids in the team where the work was done 
• Duration of the work (number of months) 
• Applicant address.

The award will consist in a grant of Euro 800 and be attributed during the Meeting of The Hague (09-13 October 2011). 

Solid, Liquid, Gas, Supercritical, ¿new phase?

Everybody studied in his childhood 3 states of the materials...
Solid, liquid and gas...
If you follow this blog you may know that above certain pressure and temperature there is another state where the inter-phase of liquid and gas disappears, is the supercritical state.
If you are scientist you may have heard about plasma state... were gases are ionisated...
But a study of superconductor materials seems to have discovered a new state.

Supercritical carbon dioxide Brayton Cycle turbines promise giant leap in power generation

Supercritical fluids are not only used as a solvent media for extraction or fractionation...
In the article I've found the supercritical carbon dioxide is used as fluid for moving turbines in systems that claims higher efficiency.

SOURCE : Sandia Labs News Releases March 4, 2011

Sandia National Laboratories researchers are moving into the demonstration phase of a novel gas turbine system for power generation, with the promise that thermal-to-electric conversion efficiency will be increased to as much as 50 percent -- an improvement of 50 percent for nuclear power stations equipped with steam turbines, or a 40 percent improvement for simple gas turbines. The system is also very compact, meaning that capital costs would be relatively low.